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

CES is just around the corner so it is a busy time in the gadget world with a lot of big announcements due.

Alongside Adobe, Intel has announced plans to bring its new Media Processor CE 3100 to market along with a new optimized version of Adobe Flash. These efforts, according to Intel, will “provide consumers with richer and more seamless Web-based and video viewing experiences through advanced Intel-based cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray Disc players, digital TVs and retail connected AV devices.” Coincidentally, we want more seamless Web-based and video viewing experiences, so this new allegiance should work out perfectly. 2009 is looking to be the year of the multi-source set top box which is plenty interesting to say the least. Set top technology has hardly gone mainstream but manufacturers of all shapes and sizes are incredibly eager to make it happen.

Brandimage have come up with an ingenious solution to the millions of plastic bottles that are used each day for water. They have developed the 360 Bottle which is made from 100% renewable paper.

Apparently 60 million plastic bottles are used each day in the U.S alone! So if this product could hit the mainstream there would be considerable benefits for the environment!

Also I am sure Brandimage would earn a little pocket money if they managed to get all 60 million of them bottles made from their product!

The company has already received an IDEA (International Design Excellence Award) for this design so hopefully it will get enough attention to be taken seriously as an alternative for plastic bottles.

Freesat has been around for a few months now, and while it may of arrived to a  slightly lukewarm reception it does appear to be gaining momentum. One of the major downfalls of it was that it lacked the recording functions of Sky+ or DVB solutions such as the Humax and Topfield.

I am glad to see Humax has fitted the device with a heft 320GB hard disk so there is plenty of room to record all your favourite shows.

I was personally a bit anti Freesat when it released, however I have just ditched Sky in favour of a Humax PVR9150T (DVB recorder) as I just don't watch any of the exclusive sky channels. One of the reasons I didn’t try out Freesat was the lack of recording so I think I could be swayed to trying out one of these new boxes in the near future.

Full specification continued.

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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.

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.

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

Asus announced yet another smartphone, though no info on a release date. The is supposed to be the fastest Business PDA Phone in the World, running a Marvell TavorP 800MHz CPU at 800Mhz and Windows Mobile 6.1.

The phone is fully touch screen and uses the Asus Glide touch-responsive user interface. Glide enables users to perform a variety of navigational actions—such as selecting, zooming, scrolling and flipping with simple flicks of the finger.

Other features include a 2.8 inch screen with VGA resolution, HSDPA, Wifi, 3MP camera, microSD card slot, and 3hrs with 3G and 4 hrs with 2G battery life.