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

Update: Wow, we have been impressed with the number of entries! We have now closed the competition and picked a winner by using random.org to select a comment number.

The winner is : Roisin Nuttall

Argos is offering a Mighty Gadget reader the chance to win an 8GB iPod Touch, worth £149.99.

Arguably, one of the best MP3 players on the market this is an opportunity not to be missed. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post.

Please use your real name and give a valid email address and only enter the competition once.

All comments are moderated and we reserve the right to accept or deny any comments made. Once your comment has been accepted you will be eligible to win the iPod Touch.

We will be opening the competition to anyone within the EU and we will announce the winner next Friday (20/08/2010).

This prize has been supplied courtesy of Argos, who provide a wide range of MP3 players, such as the iPod Touch and iPod Nano. Please note Argos only deliver to the UK

Sick of feeding the pockets of the Apple Monster, or want to start paying for your “downloads” so not to be breaking the law. Well UK high street entertainment chain HMV have re-launched it’s digital service(yes they’ve had one for several years now) to include 10 million songs and the certainly very interesting UK Top 40 tracks for a meagre 40p per track.

This has mainly come due to the fact the cd singles market is dying with many now only available on download only which means going to iTunes or Amazon to get a “legal” download of said songs. HMV is obviously the only high street trader now of entertainment product and have now started to dabble in other entertainment forms to keep the business modern and up to date with the acquisition of the MAMA group (HMV now have their own branded music venues like the HMV Forum and HMV Apollo) which in turn leads to their ticket sales service through HMV.com and are also having their own branded cinemas too.

What has pushed HMV to re-launch it’s digital was it’s multi-million acquisition of the digital music provider 7Digital. This then added more expertise in the digital music field and added a significant number of digital tracks to HMV’s disposal. 7Digital provides Spotify with it’s music and if you’re a user you’ll know the sheer scale of what they can offer to their customers.

So what does it offer over Apple other than the price? Well the new HMV digital service will be compatible with all mp3 players(previous incarnations had only wma support) and the majority of the tracks it provides have a bitrate of 320kbps to Apple’s 256kbps (some are lower on the HMV site due to “historical hangovers”. Not only this but purchased tracks can be synced using iTunes or Windows Media Player and if you happen to delete your track by accident, you can re-download without being charged again.

The 40p chart titles is only a limited time offer with no exact date for finish. Can HMV take a chunk out of an iTunes dominated market.

We touched yesterday on the new iMac upgrades and talked about the notion that some people only buy Macs because they’re “pretty”. Well another new Apple product that takes all aesthetic pleasantries from the iMac and that lovely Aluminium MacBook Pro and basically makes it a simple screen is Apple’s LED Cinema Display. If you didn’t know already the Cinema Display is basically a Monitor which can be used with either Mac desktop PCs or with laptops. Older models of the Cinema Display were limited to what could actually be plugged into it, but now Apple have seen the fault and left it accessible to basically any type of current Notebook or Desktop Mac.

Ok so what’s great about it other than looks. Originally available in a 24” or 30” model Apple has now opted for just a straight 27” more than adequate space and room for you to do your work and with a resolution 2560 x 1440 it’s certainly packing the pixel power. Obviously as it’s now LED backlit, the screen is super bright with no wait time and greater control of brightness of your screen, not only that it has an ambient light sensor that can adjust the screen brightness to an optimum setting for whatever light your room is currently in.

Other things it has include built in sound, a 49W built in speaker with subwoofer, for fantastic sound whether from your games or media content. It has a built in I-Sight camera and microphone for things like Skype and also packs great connectivity with 2 USB 2.0 ports and 2 Firewire 400 ports. One thing Apple are pushing with the display is it’s eco-friendly, free from harmful toxins and is made of recyclable materials

All in all it’s a great monitor to have if you have a Mac or Macbook. However like all things Apple it comes with a price to match. As it stands there’s no price and only a “Coming Soon” date but looking back at the older models you can expect anything from £700 to £1000 at least.

We’ve been a bit slow to up this news to you but the iMac has recently had a spec overhaul (as they do) and they look pretty tasty. However I’ll always be a PC fan but I can see the draw for some people to go for the iMac providing it’s for a genuine reason other than “it’s Apple” or “it’s pretty”

Anyway what’s it got. Well firstly it’s processor power. Now packing all your favourite and latest Core i3, i5 and i7 processors with Core i3 offerings of 3.2GHz, i5 of 3.6GHz and the massive 27” iMac can house a super Quad-Core 2.93GHz Core i7. So speed is certainly upped. Memory wise they start with a decent enough 4GB of RAM which can be upgraded to 16GB. 500GB of HDD will be standard but one can now opt for the 256GB SSD or again if you’re looking at the behemoth 27”, it can hold up to 2TB of HDD. The SD card slot now supports SDXC cards which at the moment reach as far as 64GB so certainly there’s plenty of space to be found for all your media and docs. The other spec increase comes in the form of a ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics card perfectly capable of delivering high quality HD graphics and media content on the now standard LED backlit screen.

Packing all the usual goodies of Bluetooth, Firewire 800 and N-standard WiFi the new iMacs are ready to go now and will start at £999

Apple is always busy this time of year, recently we had the iMac changes, then iPhone 4 and iPhone OS 4.0. Now the Mac Mini has got a makeover too and has appeared on the Apple website and is available to buy now. Originally these were the space saving, money saving alternative to an iMac or Macbook, for internet surfing and other basic computing tasks but now the price has been bumped up slightly and with the extra power inside the capabilities of it have also improved.

The first main change is the box itself. A mere 1.4” thin It’s now made from the single Aluminium sheet the Macbook Pro sports but also alongside it’s DisplayPort it now has HDMI out to connect it to any HDTV. The second big change is obviously what’s in the machine.

Lower spec Mac mini - £649

• 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor
• 2GB of memory
• 320GB HDD
• NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics
• Mac OS X Snow Leopard
• 8x double-layer SuperDrive

There’s also another more expensive model with Snow Leopard Server

• 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4GB memory
• Dual 500GB 7200-rpm hard drives¹
• NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics
• Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard

So what a great week for my internet to not be “available” the week when Apple just about announces all of its goodies for the year. Now I try to keep away from any “leaked” pictures or material, unless from a very reliable source and with the sheer amount of rumour mongering on the iPhone 4, it hasn’t been worth bombarding you with fuzzy images of phones in an American bar’s toilet and such, so now its actually official. Even Steve Jobs made a joke about the leaks, saying “Stop me if you’ve already seen this”

So what’s new you ask? Well the first thing to note is that the iPhone 4 is just 9.3mm thick which makes it 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS and it’s mainly made of stainless steel not the flimsy plastic that has led my girlfriend to have 3, 3G replacements. Inside will be Apple’s A4 processor which currently runs the iPad and will be available in a 16GB and 32GB, yep no 64GB .

Usual stuff aside what makes this stand out more than the 3GS. The screen has seen a vast improvement. 3.5” of 960x649 improvement. That is a 326dpi density. The sharpest screen currently on any smartphone currently available. Apple has named this the “Retina Display” Not only that the sharpness will be beyond what the human eye can distinguish, at high densities. Also it will run all your older apps with the same clarity, upscaling the images as opposed to the iPad which stretches them.

The next major improvement is the camera. AT LAST A FLASH. Yes that’s right a FLASH! Bumped up to 5MP with a backside illuminated sensor, coupled with an LED flash, the camera can zoom in gigitally up to 5x and can also shoot 30fps 720p video. The movie captre also now has it’s own iMovie dedicated app. There’s also a front facing camera allowing what Apple calls FaceTime, a videocall feature only available over a WiFi connection

Other things you may want to know. Battery life still doesn’t look great. 7 hours 3G talktime, 10 hours WiFi internet browsing or video playback and a 300 hour standby time. There’s also increased accuracy with the motion controls with Apple adding a three-axis gyroscope a la “Wii Remote”. This was demoed by Jobs in a game of Jenga and Apple are hoping game developers will make use of this function to create better more immersive games.

On sale 24th June and pre-orders starting from the 15th, i’ll post some info on the prices as nobody is totally sure what they’ll be as all the major networks are snapping up the iPhone for sale, so as soon as I have them all I’ll put them on.

The Tegra was the original powerhouse in the mobile world powering the soon to be Microsoft Kin Mobile phones and also that “not for Britain” PMP the Zune HD. With stiff competition from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, mobile Intel chips and ARM, all good at what they do. TEGRA never failed to impress in its reviews and actions delivering application speed and HD video with ease.

Now Nvidia are planning to release the next TEGRA chip sometime this year, hoping to launch in conjunction with the 3rd generation of Android. Yes that’s right rather than sticking with Microsoft NVIDIA has obviously spotted the potential in Google’s OS and it’s rise in popularity in the mobile market. Co-Founder Jen-Hsun Huang has said that the future holds plenty of TEGRA powered Android phones and tablets to confirm this. He’s also gone on to point out that their main rival will be the iPad and it’s chipset the A4, currently the iPad’s chip and the planned next processor to be in the iPhone 4.0.

“The bar is pretty high for all the mobile players and they need a processor that can keep up with the A4. If not be much better than what the A4 can do because they have to take on the leader in the space.” – Huang on the Apple A4 processor

“I think the second generation Tegra has been doing incredibly well because Android is doing incredibly well. So we’re going to come to market with second-generation Tegra with the third generation Android.” Huang on Tegra and Android.

Certainly will make for a more interesting competition in the future for sure.

Now after our iPad officialdom release news t’other day, Apple themselves released the plans for data usage before the mobile carriers had done it themselves. Now I dont’t need to go into great detail about the plans as it’s plain for all to see in the image. What is surprising is how different the prices are and the options you get. Vodafone especially.

After looking at it long and hard, it obviously depends on what kind of usage you think you will use with your iPad. O2 offering more daily usage for your money than Orange but Orange offering more usage in a monthly frame. Vodafone’s tariffs appear to be ludicrous in comparison.

Obviously this is just the prices for the 3G/WiFi models of the iPad which cost more than the just WiFi so also bear in mind you will have to pay for the iPad itself.