In our recent Sonos ZonePlayer S5 story, we said the S5 was the most affordable entry into the world of Sonos. That was a total lie, we’re afraid: the cheapest way is to win one from us.

To celebrate the launch of the new system, Sonos has not only given us a brand-new ZonePlayer S5 music system to pass on to a lucky reader, but also a lush CR200 controller as well. That’s over £600 of wireless music bliss.

The S5 is an entirely self-contained wireless music streamer, with built-in speakers so you don’t need any existing audio hardware. All music stored on a PC or Mac can be streamed over your Wi-Fi network, or via Ethernet. Or you can stream as much music as you want from Napster’s library of millions of songs (subscription required), or from Last.fm (disclaimer: Last.fm is owned by CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET UK).

The controller lets you control all of this, and entirely wirelessly. You don’t need an existing Wi-Fi network either — it talks to the S5 via its own built-in wireless system. To learn more about the controller and the new Sonos ZonePlayer, check out our separate CR200 and S5 hands-on reports.

Or, if you’re ready to enter to win, hit up our Win Things section right now.

The post Win a Sonos S5 music system and CR200 controller worth £600! first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

HTC has unveiled what it is claiming is a new type of smart phone, focusing on ease of use rather than advanced features. The HTC Smart will run on a platform from Qualcomm called Brew.

It’s a pretty little touchscreen phone, and it runs the same ‘Sense’ user interface as seen on other HTC phones, including the Hero — a phone we’d practically make love to. It’s powered by a 300MHz processor (the iPhone 3G runs at just over 400MHz; the 3GS just over 600Mhz), with quad-band 3.6Mbps HSDPA data connectivity.

Other features include a 71mm (2.8-inch) LCD screen, a 3-megapixel camera, 256MB of internal memory, a microSD slot for memory expansion and up to 600 hours of standby time. Most of these specs scream ‘budget’, so we expect the Smart to be very affordable. It’s not known if the screen is of the resistive or capacitive type, but HTC’s last budget outing, the Tattoo, was disappointingly resistive.

The company elaborated on this. “HTC Smart utilises Qualcomm Brew, an operating system that enables smart-phone devices to be offered at more aggressive price points, providing HTC with the flexibility to deliver smart-phone features on devices across multiple tiers.”

Looks like this could be just the first in a number of Brew-powered HTC phones. Note that the Brew platform has actually been around for years, and has its own open developing kit for developers to use to build apps for any phones running it.

The HTC Smart will go on sale across Europe in the spring, though prices are yet to be disclosed. Expect it to be free on very reasonable contracts in the UK.

The post HTC Smart: A smart phone that’s cheap as chips first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

To celebrate the sudden outbreak of crystalline precipitation currently falling on Britain, Amazon.com has announced it’ll now ship an international version of its massive, designed-for-newspapers-and-textbooks Kindle to the UK — the Kindle DX.

In principle it’s the same as the standard Kindle (which we reviewed late last year), but features a larger 246mm (9.7-inch) E-Ink screen. “Kindle DX is great for personal and professional documents, cookbooks and textbooks — anything that is highly formatted,” Amazon says.

It also now supports Adobe PDF files natively (Kindles previously needed to have these converted to a format it liked), so pre-formatted pages of text, images and diagrams involve significantly less messing about. Up to 3,500 books can be stored in memory, Amazon claims, and the battery should let you read for a full week without charging.

The Kindle DX for UK features the same built-in wireless bookstore as the standard Kindle, including free wireless downloads via the device’s integrated 3G modem. Its screen — which only requires power to turn pages, not to keep displaying them — can generate 16 shades of grey. Sony’s Readers, by contrast (ha), use just eight. This means images look far better on Kindles.

But here’s where we stop a moment and raise the old eyebrow. Because Amazon only ships the model from the US, you have to pay an “import deposit” of $89 — up front — on top of the $489 base price for the Kindle DX. We don’t know if this covers VAT and import duty — it’s about 18 per cent of the total — but we’ll try to find out.

Add on another $20.98 for delivery, and you get an overall cost of a notch under $600 (£375). Blimey.

Pre-ordering is available from today, and shipping begins on 19 January. Question is, are you prepared to spend the best part of £400 for a massive ebook reader?

Us? We don’t think anyone should buy an ebook reader yet at all.

The post Kindle DX now available in UK: It’s not fat, it’s big boned first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

Consumer demand is what you’d see if Ford said it was working on building a car powered by sneezes. It’s not what we’re seeing for tablet computers.

Let’s look back to 2006, when nobody was asking for £200 robot dinosaurs, but Ugobe said it had designed one anyway. People continued not to demand them into 2007, but in oblivious response, Ugobe brought out a robot dinosaur called Pleo.

The modest hype for the useless product quickly drained away. Store shelves were left stocked with expensive mounds of rubbery green drek with legs, which consumers not only didn’t need, but for £200 they bloody well didn’t want either. In the first half of 2009, Ugobe filed for bankruptcy, pushing dinosaurs into their second extinction in as many epochs.

It’s now 2010, and we’re seeing tablet computers being hyped as if they’re pocket-sized supercomputers powered by global warming itself. They are not. They won’t even fit in your pocket, for crying out loud.

The most notable example is the one from Apple — the iSlate/MacBook Touch/iBlahBlahBlahPad — which doesn’t even officially exist yet. The same goes for Microsoft’s alleged dual-display Courier. Then there’s the dirt-cheap JooJoo, formerly known as the CrunchPad. It, too, is yet to hit shelves with a real, honest-to-goodness price tag.

And now we’ve got Freescale saying it’s designing a super-cheap one as well, while Hearst says it’s been working on making a bendy tablet-cum-ebook reader. Sticking to recent tradition, neither have release dates, and neither have high-street price tags.

All this, despite what I see as zero consumer demand. Sure, there’s the dense, niche group of early adopters (myself included) who think they might like one. But no-one in their right mind would call this ‘consumer demand‘, any more than you’d call the pining for the return of Birds Eye’s discontinued potato Alphabites consumer demand.

And it’s been this way for years. Throughout history we’ve seen the tech industry toy with the idea of tablet computers. We’ve seen magazines ask, “Is this the year of the tablet computer?” And for years the answer, as dictated by the collective jangling of consumer wallets and purses, has been, “No. No it is not.”

Now we’re in a new year, people are once again asking the same, tired question. But this time manufacturers are frantically scrambling to build their own tablets, and the press is scrambling to write about them. Consumers? Meh, they’re not doing a whole lot of scrambling. It’s leading us to wish everyone would relax the talk about how 2010 is going to be the year of the tablet — almost all of which don’t exist yet — at least until they do exist.

Even when Apple released the iPhone, it wasn’t really until it hit its second generation that it became a global, industry-disrupting smash. So even if Apple unveils a tablet designed by Jehovah himself, and consumer demand not only begins, but explodes, you can bet your bottom dollar/pound/yen that it’ll be 2011 that’s the year of the tablet, not 2010.

After all, some nutter’s bringing Pleo back, so 2010 could end up being the year of the piggin’ dinosaur anyway.

The post Tablet PCs: Can we please calm the hype? first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

New Year’s Eve is always a whopper of a night for phone fingering. This morning O2 tipped us off to the fact that between 7:15am on 31 December and 7:15am on 1 January, its revelling UK customers sent nearly a quarter of a billion text messages to other phones.

“O2 customers sent 227 million text messages [over New Year],” an O2 spokesperson exclusively told Crave via email. “That’s up 28 per cent from our previous record on NYE 2007/8.”

To put that in context, Orange also filled us on on its figures. “On New Year’s Eve, Orange customers sent more than 125 million text messages. Most messages were sent between 5pm and 3am, peaking just before midnight.”

In related news, Orange also told us that on Christmas Day its customers sent 1.2 million MMS picture messages, which it said was an 11 per cent increase over the same period the previous year.

The post O2 users sent a quarter of a billion texts saying ‘Happy New Year!!! xx’ first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

To celebrate (pictured) the excruciating lateness of the Palm Pre to the UK late last year, Palm has set a date for paid-for applications to be available on the device in Europe: this March.

Yeah, that’s only, what, a billion years later than it should be? It might not seem like a big deal, but paid apps are usually the best apps, and goodness knows the Pre needs some extra selling points to help it battle the now multi-networked UK iPhone and Android devices.

So it’s getting some extra selling points. Six hundred of them, in fact. From March, Palm will intravenously inject over half a thousand paid apps into your Pre’s UK app store — something the US has had for months.

For developers, paid apps offer an obvious incentive for writing Pre applications: moolah. On the iPhone, games developer Tepulous was reported recently to be snagging a cool million dollars for downloads of its software. And not once, but every month. The situation is very different on other platforms, where very little money is being made.

But in the UK there’s currently no chance at all of getting paid for that effort, so developers don’t have a Brian Blessed-sized reason to give a damn. Roll on March, we say.

The post UK Palm Pre to get paid apps in March first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

Today is Nate‘s birthday. To celebrate, Teletext is being switched off. That’s a birthday-present fail if you ask us.

The service’s owners, Associated Newspapers, confirmed the analogue and digital TV editorial offerings were being shut on 15 December, claiming they “had been loss-making in recent years and no viable business model could be found.”

The hearing-impaired needn’t worry, as the p888 subtitle service will continue to operate, and non-editorial parts of the business, such as TeletextHolidays and TeletextCars, are unaffected.

But as for all that news and sport editorial on your TV, which has been there since the 70s, you’ll need to refocus your viewing spheres to Teletext’s giggling murderer: the Internet. It was only a kid in the 80s, but now it’s old enough to drink and own guns. Turns out that was bad news for Mr Telly McText.

The BBC’s Ceefax service is unaffected by all this, incidentally. But Teletext’s Bamboozle trivia game, which we have fond memories of playing as a kid in our gran’s house, is as dead as said gran.

Leave your nostalgic comments below.

Image credit: alx_chief, licensed under CC.

The post Teletext is dead: Happy Christmas, luddites! first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

Greetings, Androids. Some good news for you from Spotify today: the new version of its app for Android has been released, with additional support for version 2.0 of the OS (aka Eclair), which means it’ll work on the snazzy Motorola Milestone, or Droid as it’s known in the States.

It’ll add a feature previously available on the iPhone version, which lets you skip through tracks in your playlist by swiping cover art to the left or right. There’s also a new homescreen widget that lets you play, pause and skip tracks without having to fire up the main Spotify application.

For sharing, you can now copy the URI links to Spotify songs for sharing on social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter or even via SMS and MMS. These are the links that fire up the Spotify app to start playing whichever song you’ve shared on a friend’s computer or phone.

The update is free and available now. To get it, visit the Android Marketplace and search for Spotify, or visit m.spotify.com in your phone’s Web browser and install it manually.

The post Spotify Android app updated with bundle of new features first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

Orange is now selling the iPhone, and O2 is no longer the UK’s exclusive iPhone network. But it puts you, dearest consumer, in quite the pickle: not only are the two models offered identical, but so are the prices (almost). So how on Earth do you decide which network to choose?

We’re here to help. First, we’ll examine the tariffs offered by the two companies.

Contracts compared

Both Orange and O2 offer 18- and 24-month contracts, and each network’s inclusive messages and minutes are extremely similar — identical in some cases. Take a look at our handy chart below.

*Note that we have rounded down to the nearest pound for ease of understanding. The actual differences in price between O2 and Orange’s plans are less than 3p (Orange: £29.36, £34.26, £44.04, £73.40. O2: £29.38, £34.26, £44.05, £73.41).

Regardless of contract length — 18- or 24-month — the inclusive minutes and texts you get are identical. Orange definitely offers the best deal on its £29-a-month plan though, giving you twice the number of minutes and texts O2 does. But all other plans are identical, so there’s nothing to gain by choosing one network over the other here.

The price of the phones themselves is complicated, but the difference is almost negligible, as Orange and O2’s prices are damn near identical as well. More on that later, but let’s look at data and Wi-Fi prices first, as this is where the networks really differ.

‘Unlimited’ Internet explained

Orange and O2 both claim to offer ‘unlimited‘ Internet on their iPhone plans. Orange, however, imposes a ‘fair-use policy’ limit of 750MB. Yeah, weird. So we pretended to be a customer, called Orange’s salespeople, and grilled them on the matter. “It’s not unlimited then, is it?” we said.

“Well, it is and it’s not,” laughed the admittedly friendly salesbloke. “It’s got a limit on there, but your average user would use between about 50 and 70 [MB] a month… you could be on there 24 hours a day and you’re not going to hit that, y’know?”

Yes, we know. But we don’t believe that justifies calling it ‘unlimited’. He had an answer for us. Here it is, verbatim: “Because of the sort of average use, erm, we’ve been allowed to call it an unlimited package.”

Great! Winning on a technicality, perhaps? We weren’t satisfied, so we called them again to speak to someone else. They said, “You’re not charged for anything over that, we would just monitor it… We would just tell you and maybe advise to have an extra bundle added on.”

That would cost money. So, to summarise, if you go for Orange’s unlimited iPhone data plan, you won’t be charged for going over the limit, but you might be asked to pay for a bundle that gives you more data. That, ladies and gents, is what we call a total fail.

Orange’s salespeople were adamant that fair-use policies on so-called unlimited plans are commonplace on all networks, and they’re absolutely right. There’s no illegal practice going on at all. But we wanted to see what O2’s stance was. So, donning our monicker of ‘Nicholas Jones’ — our make-believe iPhone customer — we called O2’s saleschaps to ask about their unlimited data plan.

We were highly surprised to hear the friendly gentleman tell us O2 also enforced a fair-use policy on its unlimited iPhone data plan, but that it was 8GB — over 10 times what Orange offers. This in itself is brand-new information, as we believed O2’s definition of fair usage to be about 200MB. We were wrong.

To make absolutely sure this new 8GB figure was correct (there’s no mention of any data limit in its terms and conditions pages), we called O2’s public-relations department. A spokesperson told us there’s absolutely no figure in its fair-use policy — 8GB or otherwise — at which iPhone customers might face problems with O2.

Seems like the left hand isn’t talking to the right. But either way, whether there’s an 8GB limit or absolutely no limit whatsoever, it’s a hell of a lot better than what Orange is offering. And for this reason, we’re compelled to recommend you choose O2 if 3G data is your concern.

Or are we?

3G coverage compared

You see, there’s one massive problem: 3G coverage. According to Ofcom, Orange’s 3G network coverage is far better in the UK than O2’s is. And we’ve got charts to highlight the difference for you.

Here’s O2’s data coverage, according to Ofcom earlier this year:

And now, here’s Orange’s 3G coverage:

Quite a difference. So while you might get a significantly better deal on your data allowance with O2, service in your area might be weaker than what Orange provides. We can’t help you with this much more than to look at where you are on the maps above and see if you appear to be well covered. Or, better still, get an unlocked phone, an Orange SIM card, an O2 SIM card, and see which is better for 3G data.

Handset cost compared

Finally, we’ll look at the cost of handsets. There’s barely anything in it. In all cases, there’s less than £1 difference between any given model of iPhone on O2 and Orange. Here’s our handy diagram comparing the 8GB iPhone 3G on all tariffs, for all contract lengths, on both networks.

For the iPhone 3GS it’s more confusing, thanks to there being a 16GB model and a 32GB model offered on both networks. We’ve tried to make this as simple as possible, but there’s only so far that’s possible.

Conclusion

With almost identical prices from phone to contract, and practically identical inclusive minutes and texts across all offerings from both networks, choosing will be difficult. If you’re worried, however, about using way more than 750MB of data each month on your iPhone, we suggest O2. It also offers unlimited use of Wi-Fi with The Cloud, whereas Orange also imposes a fair-use limit of 750MB of data on its inclusive Wi-Fi offerings via BT OpenZone hotspots. Pfft.

If you struggle to get 3G in your area already though, and want more of a chance of staying within range of a 3G connection, Orange might be your best bet. Just be prepared to be asked to pay for a better data package if you keep going over the limit on your unlimited data.

One final thing: if you’d like a one-month contract on an iPhone, don’t miss our extremely popular guide to getting just that.

The post iPhone on Orange or O2? We compare first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

MySpace Music launched in the UK today, and we just don’t get it. Not only is it ludicrously late to the party (even Sky — a TV company — beat it to market), it’s just horrible to use.

The idea is that you can stream as much free music as you want (think Spotify, Sky Songs, et al), from major artists down to unsigned bands. But, for one thing, browsing for this music is a joke — click an artist from MySpace Music’s charts and you get taken to their MySpace artist page, not a list of their streamable songs.

Then there’s the convoluted results page itself. After searching for music to listen to, you get an enormous page of content. At the top, there’s a box of four Google AdWords-style advertisements. Below that are links to the artist page of whoever you searched for. Below that are music video results. At this point you run out of monitor space, so keep scrolling. Ah ha — there they are! Albums and song results! Crikey, that took some getting to.

Next up: downloads. Some songs can be purchased via links to the iTunes Store. There are two problems here. The first problem is that these downloads require that you install and use the iTunes desktop software.

The second problem is MySpace’s claim that these DRM-free downloads are ‘playable on all digital music devices‘. That’s just totally untrue. iTunes is DRM-free, sure, but its downloads are in AAC format, not MP3, and we have a vast selection of devices which don’t play this format.

We gave up at this point. It’s bad enough having to fight MySpace’s horrible designs to find the music it has, but, when there are so many alternatives, it seems like MySpace is just rubbing salt into the plentiful wounds.

MySpace Music also offers some other features, such as options to build playlists. Rich gave this aspect of the site some love, saying that “sharing playlists is more sophisticated than with Spotify”. But, overall, “it’s too counter-intuitive” to go back to.

Have a look at MySpace Music and tell us what you think in the comments section below.

The post MySpace Music stumbles into the UK: Eugh first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.