Gadgets

Hello, my name is Ryan and I have a problem. I have been struggling with this addiction for almost 2 weeks now and I can’t seem to shake it. The Blackberry Bold 9700 has taken over my life. It has seduced me into the BB universe and has quite literally hijacked my social circle. All who use it, swear by its convenience and ease of use, and I agree completely. The Blackberry is inching ever closer to that elusive smartphone ...

We live in a world of ubiquitous computing -- there are ever more computing devices everywhere. We will soon live in a world of ubiquitous video cameras. You probably have one staring at you right now just inches away from your face -- the camera in your laptop or desktop. There are video cameras on street corners, business premises, highways. The Brits have the most video cameras per head of population but other countries are catching up. The CCTV technology is ...

Can one truly have a pocket sized netbook and a phone in one package? Or does one function fall by the wayside in favour of the other? Memeburn took a look at the Nokia N900 to see if it makes the grade as a netbook/phone hybrid. At first glance the N900 seems impressive. It has a 600MHz Arm Cortex CPU, 256MB of ram and 32GB of onboard storage, with a high resolution, crystal clear 3.5in screen. Naturally, it also has all ...

Steve Song has spent the past two years as a fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, looking at ways to lower the costs of communications infrastructures. On Day 1 of the Tech4Africa conference in Johannesburg, he introduced the fruits of his labour to a captive audience, the Mesh Potato, a low cost wireless mesh device that you can also plug into a normal phone to provide cheap and simple connectivity. During his presentation, Song made a passionate plea for lowering the costs ...

Research In Motion's (RIM) unveiled their latest creation, the Blackberry Torch 9800, to an expectant consumer market on Tuesday at a private launch event in New York City. Available exclusively on the AT&T network, RIM's new flagship device will compete head on with Apple's iPhone. The Torch combines touch-based features similar to the iPhone with a physical Blackberry keyboard and rounds it off with a few unique touches. The refreshed Blackberry OS 6 makes its first official appearance on a Blackberry ...

The user interface employed by mobile phones has not adapted sufficiently to accommodate the communication needs of the average user in the 21st Century. But help is at hand from social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter that can serve as inspiration for designers of handheld devices looking to improve on the way we communicate. So says Pieter Streicher, the managing director of BulkSMS.com, who maintains that "it is ridiculous that many aspects of the mobile phone user interface haven’t changed in ten ...

With some of the details of the new iPhone 4 leaked a few months ago by tech blog Gizmodo, the hype around last night’s launch of Apple’s latest version of the iPhone was always going to be more about the finer detail Apple CEO Steve Jobs would provide. With a vastly-improved camera-operating system, a richer display, video calls, and some real advancements in the hardware department, the new iPhone 4 demonstrates once again that Apple is the undisputed leader ...

Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed the new iPhone 4 at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday evening, calling the redesigned gadget the "biggest leap" the company had taken since the launch of the first iPhone. After tech blog Gizmodo unceremoniously leaked pictures of the new iPhone prototype a few months ago, Jobs' was looking to turn up the hype. Jobs acknowledged the leak by saying: "Some of you have already seen this." Gizmodo failed to crack an invite ...

There’s a lot to be said for an instrument that reflects the word ‘Hero’ back at you when you turn it on. It’s a great motivator to go out there and be the best you can be. Clearly, the developers at HTC had this word imprinted on their brains when they designed this handset. The Hero is truly a remarkable piece of technology, and a serious threat to the universal dominance of the iPhone. HTC has spent an enormous amount ...

Nokia, how do you disappoint me? Let me count the ways. You have great hardware: reliable, tough, ergonomically excellent and a robust operating system. But then you ruin it with shortsighted, badly-integrated, buggy software applications and “services”. And then you ruin it even more by compromising engineering and design decisions with your petty internal politics and power struggles. Harsh? Yes. And this is coming from a died-in-the-wool Nokia fan-boy. My first phone was an Ericsson in 1995. I think it was a ...