Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

It is rumoured that Apple is currently in negotiations with Universal, Warner and Sony BMG to secure the rights for its iTunes website to distribute music without DRM.

This could have very big implications for Apple and the music industry as a whole as DRM has always been one of the main talking points of downloadable music. The music industry has typically been pro DRM to stop piracy while the end user is normally anti DRM as it has a tendency to screw the user over by restricting what you can play the files on.

If iTunes manages to secure the deal it could mean that people without iPods will be able to download music from iTunes and play on whatever device they want.

Currently Play.com and 7Digital already offer DRM free music, and there are rumours that Sony may also be ditching DRM however iTunes has the largest catalogue of music and therefore it would be a significant deal.

For those of you that despise the mess of wires and enjoy a bit of retro gaming on the Wii there are a growing number of solutions for you. One of which is the Snakebyte Wii Wireless Retro Controller.

The manufacturer of this controller, SnakeByte, a European peripheral manufacturer that is offering an increasingly large range of peripherals for the NDS, PS3, PSP, Wii and the Xbox 360.

The Wireless Retro Controller is quite simply what it says on the box, a wireless version of the retro controller.

The controller works by inserting a wireless dongle into the Wiimote, and it requires 2 batteries on top of the 2 you already have in the Wiimote. This is one thing I did think that was bad about the controller, just think of the number of batteries you could potentially go through? Though to be fair this is an unavoidable issue.

The controller itself is well built, it feels really solid, I haven't used any 3rd party retro controllers but I did use a 3rd party Gamecube controller (which I cant remember the name of) and I found the build to be quite poor.

Performance wise the controller met all expectations, it works just as well as the official Nintendo wired version and I had no issues with losing connection. I have not played it enough to test hw long the batteries last but all seems well so far.

The controller currently retails at £29.99 in comparison you can get the Official Nintendo Wii Classic Controller for £14.99.

In conclusion the controller is excellent, and if you hate having wires everywhere then it is a must buy, however if you are not that bothered about wires I am not sure if double the price is worth it. I would however happily pay £5-10 more than the official wired controller.

Along with the Snakebyte controller I also received the Snakebyte Wii Premium Component Cable, again this is what it says on the box. Some of the features of this premium cable include:

- Optimal picture quality with 480p signal

- Anticorrosive gold plated contacts for ideal signal quality

- Metallic cinch connectors with rubberised grips

- Additional stereo audio cinch connectors

- Solid copper wires with multiple shielding

- 2m cable length

My first reaction to the cable was very positive, the build quality is considerably better than that of the cable supplied with the Wii. All the metal connectors are gold plated and noticeably heavy compared to the cheaper Nintendo ones. The cable is also wrapped in a plastic/fabric sheath which decent improvement over the rubberised cover of the normal ones.

I have been told that the component cable is supposed to retail at £14.99 but I can currently only find it available on Amazon for £23.59.

If you are looking at upgrading your cable or want to get the best picture possible out of your Wii then I 110% recommend this.

For those of you that despise the mess of wires and enjoy a bit of retro gaming on the Wii there are a growing number of solutions for you. One of which is the Snakebyte Wii Wireless Retro Controller.

The manufacturer of this controller, SnakeByte, a European peripheral manufacturer that is offering an increasingly large range of peripherals for the NDS, PS3, PSP, Wii and the Xbox 360.

The Wireless Retro Controller is quite simply what it says on the box, a wireless version of the retro controller.

The controller works by inserting a wireless dongle into the Wiimote, and it requires 2 batteries on top of the 2 you already have in the Wiimote. This is one thing I did think that was bad about the controller, just think of the number of batteries you could potentially go through? Though to be fair this is an unavoidable issue.

The controller itself is well built, it feels really solid, I haven't used any 3rd party retro controllers but I did use a 3rd party Gamecube controller (which I cant remember the name of) and I found the build to be quite poor.

Performance wise the controller met all expectations, it works just as well as the official Nintendo wired version and I had no issues with losing connection. I have not played it enough to test hw long the batteries last but all seems well so far.

The controller currently retails at £29.99 in comparison you can get the Official Nintendo Wii Classic Controller for £14.99.

In conclusion the controller is excellent, and if you hate having wires everywhere then it is a must buy, however if you are not that bothered about wires I am not sure if double the price is worth it. I would however happily pay £5-10 more than the official wired controller.

Along with the Snakebyte controller I also received the Snakebyte Wii Premium Component Cable, again this is what it says on the box. Some of the features of this premium cable include:

- Optimal picture quality with 480p signal

- Anticorrosive gold plated contacts for ideal signal quality

- Metallic cinch connectors with rubberised grips

- Additional stereo audio cinch connectors

- Solid copper wires with multiple shielding

- 2m cable length

My first reaction to the cable was very positive, the build quality is considerably better than that of the cable supplied with the Wii. All the metal connectors are gold plated and noticeably heavy compared to the cheaper Nintendo ones. The cable is also wrapped in a plastic/fabric sheath which decent improvement over the rubberised cover of the normal ones.

I have been told that the component cable is supposed to retail at £14.99 but I can currently only find it available on Amazon for £23.59.

If you are looking at upgrading your cable or want to get the best picture possible out of your Wii then I 110% recommend this.

Raon Digital have released a new touchscreen 7-inch screen UMPC notebook (netbook). Named the Everun Note, it is claimed to be the first netbook to use a dual core processor.

The brains of the machine is an AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core CPU at 1.2GHz and also comes with up to 24GB of solid state drive or up to 80GB of hard drive space, 1GB of DDR2 memory,a 1.3MP webcam, and a sim card slot. It is apparently available in the states for $659.00 but unfortunately us Brits will have to fork out around £550!

Sounds pretty impressive but it is more than twice the price of lesser specced netbook's like the Eee PC and Acer Aspire One.

Glad to see our licence fees aren't a complete waste of money. The BBC will start streaming BBC One and BBC Two live from the 27th of November.

BBC Three, BBC Four, CBBC, CBeebies and BBC News are already broadcast on their channel websites.

Director of BBC vision Jana Bennett said this "completes our commitment" to make channels available online.

You will also continue to be able to watch any programs for up to 1 week after they have broadcast using the BBC iPlayer.

Ok USB specifications may sound extremely boring but I can tell you it is quite important and USB 3.0 will be a big improvement from the ageing USB 2.0 and the positively ancient USB 1.0.

USB 1.0 was launched in 1996 and had a sped of 1.5 Mbit/s (Low-Speed) and 12 Mbit/s (Full-Speed) meaning it would take over 10 minutes to transfer 1 Gbyte of data.

USB 2.0 was released in 2000 with a much higher speed of 480 Mbit/s allowing us to transfer 1 Gbyte of data in around 17 seconds.

USB3.0 will ramp things up again and increase the maximum speed to 5.0 Gb/s allowing us to transfer 1Gbyte in less than 3 seconds, 25GB of data will be transferred in around 70 seconds. That is pretty impressive speeds, I could fill up a 1 terra byte hard drive quite easily in my lunch break!

It is worth noting that we won't be seeing any USB 3.0 thumb drives for quite some time. Products aren't due until the end of 2009 and because it has taken so long to finalise companies are dragging their feet when it comes to implementing it. Microsoft itself has told developers to hold fire until the technology has proven itself, and has said that it will not be including support for the technology in Windows 7 when it ships.

LG seem to be ignoring any crisis in the economy and planning on releasing 125 new individual handsets globally in 2009.

LG are planning on releasing 25 phones in the UK alone.

This means they will be releasing more than 2 phones per week globally and nearly 1 phone every 2 weeks just in the UK! Crazy!

Still, I am sure it will mean they will be releasing a phone that has to appeal to every possible market and hopefully improving their market share.

The new Intel Core i7 CPU finally available in UK Shops / Web sites. The prices are quite steep at the moment and it is expected that the high demand for these chips will maintain the high prices for some time.

Approximate prices are:

The 2.66GHz Intel i7 920 is around £260 including Vat

The 2.93GHz Intel i7 940 is around £500 including Vat

The monster 3.2GHz i7 965 Extreme Edition is around £860-900 including VAT

Also the new i7 architecture needs a new motherboard and these are not cheap either. The cheapest you are likely to pay is around £230 including VAT for the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 and prices go up to an obscene £300+ including Vat for the EVGA Intel X58 or the MSI Eclipse SLi (Std).

The only semi good news is that DDR3 is coming down in price and you can get 3 x 1Gb Triple Channel DDR3 for about £100-120 including Vat

Originally via Bit Tech