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

I am sure most people have noticed there has been a big push by the big mobile phone companies recently towards selling mobile broadband.

Most new mobiles come with 3G and some form of a web browser and most companies sell some form of web access on top of the normal phone contracts. Companies like O2, T-Mobile and Vodafone are also pushing the independent mobile broadband devices where you pay anything from £15+ per month for xGb usage.

This relatively new and compeatative market has led most mobile companies to try and lure the buyer in with free laptops or netbooks if you sign up for a set period of time.

I must admit I have been a bit skeptical about it all, I have had mobile Internet on my past 2 phones. I had Web 'n' Walk from T-Mobile on my Tytn and now I have a bolt on from O2 on my E90 and while I do find it useful I get the feeling the performance is not nearly as good as it is made out to be, nor do I use it as much as I would expect.

Anyway recently I have had chance to try out one of Vodafone's offers. It is the £30 a month mobile broadband with free Dell Inspiron Mini 9.

The contract is for 24 months and the download speed is up to 3.6 Mbps with an upload up to 384Kbps.

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Review

I received the Mini 9 last Friday so I have had some time to play with it.

The specification of the Dell is:

1. Intel® Atom Processor® N270 (1.6GHz/533Mhz FSB/512K cache)
2. Windows® XP Home Edition
3. Glossy 8.9 inch LED display (1024X600)
4. 512MB² DDR2 at 533MHz
5. 4GB³ Solid State Drive
6. Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950
7. Wireless 802.11g Mini Card
8. 32WHr Battery (4 cell) (Over 4 hours battery life claimed)

My initial impression of the Mini 9 were simply its size, I have a 15" Acer and the Mini 9 in literally mini in comparison. My winter coat has massive pockets on it and I can nearly fit the Mini 9 in one of them.

The general look of the Mini 9 is quite basic, it has a glossy shell and it is quite plasticy though you can hardly expect an aluminium casing when the Mini 9  only costs around £250 to buy without a mobile broadband contract. The general build quality does feel excellent.

On booting the Dell I was a bit surprised to see Vodafone have chosen to use Windows. These devices are only really designed to be used on the Internet and for basic activities so Ubuntu would of been more than adequate and it would of reduced the cost for Vodafone.

The initial boot up of Windows did seem very slow which was a bit of a shock as I was expecting it to be much faster as it uses a solid state drive, however this was likely due to the limitations of the processor rather than the SSD. I also found the machine was installed with a lot of the crap associated with Dell computers including Mcafee, Dell's Support Center, Dells Video conferencing etc etc. I am sure all of this will certainly be slowing down the boot time.

Vodafone have only added one piece of software to manage their 3G connections.

The keyboard on the Dell is very small, which is no surprise. I wouldn't want to be typing out a novel on their, however it is still quite usable, the only problem I really had was the right hand shift key as it really is tiny and I always use this key when typing the @ symbol so I frequently made mistakes.

The Screen of the Dell is good, the resolution is 1024X600 so you can comfortably browse the Internet. It is nice and bright though one downside is that it is glossy. To be fair most laptops now use a glossy screen but considering these netbooks are designed for mobility you would think some consideration would be taken for outdoor use. Unfortunately if you are outdoors in the sun viewing the screen can be very hard.

The dell also came with the usual ports and inputs, there were 3x USB, 1x VGA, Ethernet, Card Reader, and audio jacks. I was quite impressed it has 3x USB ports as you would think it wouldn't have room for this many.

The general performance of the Dell was actually quite good. Granted there was a bit of a delay in starting up but once running I was able to do everything I wanted, I was happily running Firefox with half a dozen tabs open and I had a few apps running in the background. I also played an AVI in VLC and it played smoothly. I didn't have any HD files to play but I suspect it would start struggling a bit here.

Finally I found the battery life to be quite good, I had a meeting on Monday in Manchester. I used the Dell on the journey to and from it which was about 2.5 hours in total and the battery was still going. I am not sure if it would last past 4 hours though my use was quite heavy and I did have a 3G connection at the time as well.

Overall I found the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 to be an excellent little netbook and I plan on using it for the foreseeable future on any trips I go on. It can easily handle any daily task while being extremely portable. Yes there are a couple of little issues but they are certainly not big enough to put you off it.

Vodafone Mobile Broadband Review

So now we know that the Dell is a great little netbook how does Vodafone's mobile broadband handle?

Surprisingly very well, connecting to the Vodafone network is a simple task, you just load up thei mobile connect software wait for it to find a connection, click connect and Bobs your Unkle, you are browsing the net.

I checked the speed of the connection via Think Broadband and Speed Test (Maidenhead + Dublin) and was pleasantly surprised with the following results

Think broadband = 1.8 Mbps down and 0.3 Mbps up

Speedtest Maidenhead = 2.5 Mbps down and 0.28 Mbps up

Speedtest Dublin = 2.05 Mbps down and 0.28 Mbps up

I agreed to review the netbook and Vodafone's mobile broadband expecting to slate the performance, I have always been under the impression there is a lot of mis-selling going on in this industry and while I am sure some people sometimes maybe able to get the full speed I always thought that due to reception issues, volume of users etc the average person would not get a fraction of these speeds.

I have even previously tried another mobile broadband connection from 3 and found the connection to be 0.1Mbps down and 0.1Mbps up. This was tested knowing the reception was bad but I was expecting to see similar results from Vodafone. So to receive the above speeds is a very nice surprise indeed, granted I probably wouldn't recommend this type of connection over a ADSL line but for someone on the move then it really is worth it.

Finally now we know the Dell is excellent and Vodafone is excellent is the deal worth it? Well I think it is up to personal opinion. I wouldn't personally go for this deal. £30 per month x 24 months is £720. You can get the same 3Gb monthly allowance without the Dell for £15 per month on a 12 month contract which is £180 this would leave £540 to spare on a laptop which could be used for a better laptop. Granted this would mean an initial outlay of several hundreds of pounds which a lot of people may not have in which case the £30 a month deal is certainly appealing.

So if you want mobile broadband I would 100% recommend Vodafone and all the deals are good, but I would look at the various options and find which one suits you best before you buy.

Netbooks have always been perceived as low cost, basic computers for general web and email type activities. Well Asus says no to that preconception and has decided to fit its Asus N1oJ netbook with a Nvidia GeForce 9300 discrete graphics chip.

The rest of the spec includes a 10" 1,024x600 native resolution screen, Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and Windows XP. With a price of £455.

Obviously you wont be playing Crysis on this but Cnet did manage to play Unreal Tournament III.

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.

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.

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

Call me a nerd but I like my coolers. Whether it is a CPU or GPU cooler I get a little excited when buying one. In fact I have spent dozens of hours and probably hundreds over the years tweaking my media PC to be as quiet as possible. One of the hardest things to cool and keep quiet has always been graphics cards, there are just not as many quiet solutions as I would like. You end up in limbo between performance and heat issues.

Thermaltake have just released their Fanless 330 0dBA, the VGA cooler is specially made for hardcore gamers who demand quiet cooling device for their high-end video cards.

It claims to be able to work on nVidia cards up to 9600GT & 8800GT and ATI cards up to HD 3850 Series.

Ok so they are not the top end Graphics Cards but lets be honest you are never going to have a high end silent gaming system.

It is a shame that the Cooler does not work on the ATI HD 4670 as Bit Tech gave this an excellent review and it looks like it would make a great card for a media PC and it uses less power than a BFG Tech GeForce 9600 GT so excessive heat should not be that much of an issue.

Features of this cooler include:

- Completely Silent - Fanless design gives no noise operation
- 3 Heatsink Modules in One - 4 heatpipes & 106 fins make 3 single heatsink modules
and get multiple cooling performance
- Completely Silent – passive fanless design makes no noise but also good cooling effect
- Dual Layer Structure with 3 Heatsink Modules : conducts heat effectively from GPU and
gets more surfaces to dissipate

There has been a lot of discussion and rumours of Virgin launching its 50Mbps ADSL product recently.

Virgin Media has started a viral campaign of the new product showing off the new cable modem/router they will be supplying.

While this may indicate the new service will be arriving any time soon Think Broadband previously announced that the roll out will take to April 2009 to complete and around 40% of us will have a choice of a 50Meg product by then.

Price wise it is said to cost £52 but this is unconfirmed and you will also have to sign up to a 12 month contract.

It will be interesting to see what the upload speeds are like. I find this speed becoming more and more important recently so a 50 meg down and 0.5 meg up would be a bit pointless.

It is also worth noting that cable does not suffer the same problems as ADSL when you move away from the exchange, however user congestion does play a part in the speeds.

Recently we reported that cracking WPA and WPA2 could be speeded up by 100 fold using two GeForce GTX280’s per workstation. However the practicality of this for your every day hacker is not very realistic.

Security researchers are now saying they have refined an existing WPA crack, making it more efficient that earlier reports.

Erik Tews will appear at PacSec security conference in Tokyo next week with a presentation named "Gone in 900 seconds: Some Crypto issues with WPA." where he will show off his findings in TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) cracking, that allow WPA to be broken in a brief 12-15 minute window.

Apparently once TKIP is initialised the Pairwise Master Key (PMK) can be obtained. Normally the hacker would then have to use a brute force dictionary attack, which is slow and crude.

Tews and his partner Martin Beck have discovered a "mathematical breakthrough" that allows the WPA encryption to be cracked dramatically faster. Some of the tools Tews and Beck used are rumoured to have been already included in Aircrack-ng WEP/WPA PSK cracking tool.

It is unlikely that this hacking technique will cause any issues in the near future, and certainly not a problem for average Joe and his home wireless router.