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

In the old days pay as you go phones were cheap, cheerful and do everything required out of a phone one would need. They text, they ring. Nowadays, although not packing the super technological goods of an iPhone, HTC Desire or Galaxy S they still do their job and have basic extras. The LG “Cookie Fresh” GS290 is just that. As one of the cheapest touchscreen PAYG phones on the market (from £40ish) you wouldn’t expect too much, but if you want to know more on what we thought of it, then please click on and read our review.

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The King of Fighters XII (KOF XII) is the latest instalment of The King of Fighters series and is currently available on the PS3 and Xbox 360.

King of Fighters XII is very Street Fighter esque though it uses a 3 on 3 team system with each fight consisting of up to five rounds. Though it is possible to play in a versus mode where you can either have 3 on 3 or 1 on 1 against another player or against a CPU opponent.

One of the main things I noticed about the game were issues with the graphics. All the backgrounds in each fight are colourful and well drawn but the actual characters are blocky and have very poor detail, it was certainly not something I would expect on the PS3 unless it was a PSN game.

KOF XII has a slimmed down roster than previous versions of KOF and this has come under quite a bit of criticism from fans.

In terms of the game play it does play well and the animations of the characters are fluid and if you are not used to fighting games you can chose a simple mode which allows you to pull of character moves without pressing a ridiculous combination of buttons, or if you are more used to fighting games you can play it normally.

The game also has some issues with lag that comes with online multiplayer though I suspect this will eventually be fixed with a patch.

This game without a doubt is focussed on the more seasoned fighting game player and I am sure they will play it, however for other gamers I am unsure how appealing it is. One of the main problems I have with it is the £39.99 asking price. For a game with questionable graphics and problematic online multiplayer this is extortionate.

If the game was £10-£15 and available to download on the PSN I would say go for it, it could provide quite a lot of fun while playing against your friends on a LAN, but as a £40 game I just don't think it is worth it.

Last week Sony announced their new line of headphones, the XB series. These new headphones are designed to deliver the lowest ever bass.

The range includes and an in ear range consisting of the MDR-XB20EX and MDR-XB40. The other headphones all traditional closed-typ headphones and have a King size ear cushion and wide headband for maximum wear comfort. These headphones consist of the MDR-XB700, XB500, and XB300

All headphones in the XB series are designed to recreate the club ambience with powerful, ultra-low bass response and they all have an exclusive driver unit reproduces low frequencies accurately

Mighty Gadget have been lucky enough to try out the flagship model, the MDR-XB700. This premium headphone features innovative Sony technologies that take you straight to the heart of the dancefloor (according to their press release anyway!)

The headphones themselves are very good looking, though I imagine this could be very much a case of personal preference. They consist of a large flat headband with brushed aluminium extenders and then huge chunky ear cushions.

Sony also opted to use a flat ribbon style cable which is pretty cool unfortunately the cable is very short, the cable is only fractionally longer that that used on my Sennheiser CX300 earphones. This may sound ok but you need to take into account the Sennheiser’s are in-earphones and are generally small all round, they are great for walking around listening to your iPod etc. The MDR-XB700’s dwarf the CX300 these are literally old school styled headphones that you would expect to plug into an Amplifier and not walk around the street with. With a cable this short there is just no chance you could use them with an Amplifier or you computer. It is not all bad though, it is quite an easy fix as you can buy extenders from many electronics shop, however you shouldn’t really need to and Sony should of provided these.

Anyway lets move on, the headphones themselves are very comfortable, the ear cushion is heavily padded and even the largest ears should be able to fit in without many issues. They are also held on you head with enough force to keep them still but without squashing your head.

Thanks to the size of the ear cushions you get excellent noise cancellation, I could barely hear anything other than my music when trying them out.

In terms of the sound quality you can definitely tell these are designed for the bass, I started off listening to some Mars Volta and found the bass from the drums to be a little over powering at first, however the overall quality of sound was good. Moving on to some more bass orientated music such as DJ Yoda I found the bass focus really shines, people who enjoy dance/electronica/hip hop will really enjoy these phones. Yes you do lose a bit of mid-range/treble when playing anything with a heavy baseline however I feel the type of person that buys a range of headphones called xTra Bass and listens to music with a heavy bass such as hip hop etc will probably be loving the bass so much they wont notice treble frequencies being overwhelmed.

At the end of the day if you are an audiophile with an eclectic range of musical tastes then these headphones are probably not to your taste. If you have a car stereo that costs more than your car then I think it is a very safe bet you will enjoy these ‘phones.

Overall they do what they say on the box, and provide deep extra bass for the true bass lover. The only real criticism is the short cable, which can be over come by buying an extender but for a flagship model it should be included.

No word on pricing yet but it appears to be around $150 in the states.

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.

I was recently passed a review sample of the AceCad DigiMemo A402 from Selwyn Electronics. The DigiMemo is a portable and compact electronic notepad which you can use just like a clipboard to instantly record your notes, ideas, sketches, drawings and flowcharts both on paper and digitally at the same time.

While I am normally more used to playing around with the latest smart phones or fiddling around with the insides of my PC the DigiMemo did have some appeal to me. I am an extraordinarily disorganised person, I spend all day in front of my PC and unfortunately I have to take phone calls a lot, which leads me to making notes of conversations in notepads or just on scrap paper. This is where my problems really start I can guarantee you that within 24 hours the note I have just made will be lost, or somehow destroyed, most likely with spilt coffee. Therefore the idea of being able to convert my notes to digital format is quite appealing.

The blurb from the Selwyn site explains that:

Any ordinary paper or notepad up to A4 size (210mm x 297mm) can be used with the DigiMemo and the ultra-thin & light digital pen which takes a standard replaceable ballpoint ink cartridge provides a natural pen and paper feel. Not only does the DigiMemo use standard ink refills and paper it's also powered by standard batteries, the pad takes 4× AAA batteries which last approximately 80 hours (continual use) and the pen is powered by a standard watch battery (SR626SW) that lasts approximately 14 months. The 32MB of internal memory can hold up to 80 pages of notes and if this simply isn't enough there is the option of expanding the memory with an SD card allowing you to write and store up to 999 pages of notes. The storage capacity, battery life and ease of use makes the DigiMemo an unbeatable mobile note-taking device.

Once connected up to a PC downloading, viewing, editing and organising your notes in Windows couldn't be easier with the DigiMemo Manager Software and because the A4 DigiMemo is also a graphics tablet in Windows you can update and add to your notes in real-time on your computer! Although not included within the cost of the DigiMemo the MyScript Notes handwriting recognition software takes it to a whole new level by allowing you to convert handwritten notes from the DigiMemo into editable text in Microsoft Word with astounding accuracy in just a few seconds.

The process of installing the DigiMemo was relatively easy, and once installed software supplied allows you to transfer the pages as images into a digital form. You can then chose to convert your writing into text.

Unfortunately this is where things went a little pear shaped for me. The MyScript Notes software provided has built-in handwriting recognition and you can train the software with your handwriting by writing out the alphabet, numbers then some paragraphs of text. This is quite a tedious process and the problem I have is that not only am I chronically disorganised but my writing is bloody awful. I also tried to be lazy and not complete the all the writing that was required and this led to the software failing to get an accurate enough reading on my writing. So I had to repeat the process. 3 times!

Once I had completed the process I found the accuracy quite poor for my writing.

Overall I am not slating the DigiMemo, it is a good product and I don't think it failed, it is more that I failed to write like a normal human being. If I had slowed down and tried to write neater I am sure it would of been fine, but I wanted something that would understand my daily notes so it is not ideal to myself.

In conclusion it is an excellent product, while it is quite a niche product I could actually see it being very useful in a lot of applications. If you require the handwriting recognition then you should take into account that this technology is never perfect so you can't expect to jot illegible notes and expect it to magically decipher them.

I was recently provided a sample of the SanDisk Sansa Fuze, the new reasonably priced MP3 player. The player comes in 3 sizes of 2, 4 and 8GB at prices of approximately £55, £70, and £90 respectively (prices taken from play.com). The product also has an option of colours including blue, pink, red, silver, and black. Though Play and Amazon only appear to stock the black version, I am not sure if us Brits are restricted to this colour or not.

One of the first things to note is that this is clearly in the iPod Nano territory. The Fuze is very similar in size to the Nano but is slightly narrower and a little taller, while the nano is more short and wide. It is quite as slim as the Nano (6.5mm) being 7.3mm but I doubt 1mm is going to make a huge difference to the average Joe.

In my mind one of the most important comparisons is price. An 8GB iPod Nano will set you back £134 on Play and is £169.99 RRP. The Sansa Fuze is £89.99 and £99.99 RRP. £44 is quite a large difference, making the iPod Nano around 49% more expensive than the Sansa Fuze. Ouch

It doesn't look any better for Apple when we look at the 4GB versions. The iPod Nano is £94.99 or £99.99RRP with the Sansa Fuze being £69.99 or £79.99RRP. £25 difference which makes the iPod around 36% more expensive. That does not look to good for Apple.

So anyway lets look at the Sansa Fuze specification:

• Plays videos, music, photos and audio books
• Digital FM radio
• Up to 24 hours for audio playback and 5 hours of video playback with internal rechargeable battery
• Voice recording
• Built-in microphone
• MicroSD/microSDHC slot for additional content expansion
• Videos (MPEG-4) Music (MP3,WMA, secure WMA and audio book file formats), Photos (JPEG).

This makes it a similar spec to the iPod however there are a few additions the iPod lacks. The Fuze comes with a Digital FM radio, voice recording via the built in microphone and also a MicroSD/microSDHC slot for additional storage.

It is worth noting that the Nano has a better screen resolution of 320 x 240 pixels compared to 220 x 176 pixels.

The MicroSD/microSDHC slot is probably one of the main selling points for the Sansa Fuze, and I think it is genius. Basically you can expand the storage of your device using MicroSD cards. Most MicroSD cards come in sizes from 512MB to 8GB, though larger cards are being made, but there is a big price jump. A quick scan on the net and I found an 8GB SanDisk card with adapter for £17.95. So basically you can turn the Sansa Fuze into a 16GB player at a total cost of less than £110. Oh look, even with the extra 8GB storage the Sansa is still cheaper than a 8GB iPod Nano.

Now it is only right that I should warn any potential buyers of one big drawback of using the MicroSD card. When you add new content to the device+MicroSD it takes quite a long time to build the index or library when disconnecting. This really is quite frustrating, however I assume it is unavoidable and it is only needed after you add new content.

I found the actual device quite attractive, the front has a polished black coating while the back is a sort of matt black rubberised coating. Probably not quite as nice as the Nano, but still nice.

The controls are quite iPod esque as well, there is a mechanical clickwheel with a centre button for selecting the item. It is actually very nice to use and combined with the excellent user interface it is a very easy device to use.

As with most MP3 players the supplied earphones are a bit crap. However using some Sennheiser CX500 earphones I found the sound quality excellent.

The radio works excellently, I found no issues with reception.

Video was less promising, files are limited to MPEG-4 files at native screen resolution, which is not eexactly very good support. The quality wasnt amazing either, most likely due to the reduced resolution of 320 x 240 pixels compared to the iPods 220 x 176 pixels.

Connecting the device to the PC is very easy. It works perfectly with WMP 10 or 11 or you can drag and drop as it also acts as a mass storage device. Photos and videos need to be transferred using the Sansa Media Converter. My issue with the connection is the proprietary connector. It really grinds my gears that companies do not use a standard connector link mini-usb, however this is not an issue limited to SanDisk.

Overall I find the player an excellent little device. Yes there are a few issues, but what player is perfect? Its weakest area is probably its video capabilities, but I do not really see this as a huge problem, I would never dream of watching a video on a device with a screen as small as this.

The issue with the device taking ages to merge the MicroSD and main memory is annoying, but I think it is worth it for the flexibility. I am not sure I would want to spend £90 on the 8GB version, I think it maybe better just getting the 4Gb or 8Gb version and buying the 8GB MicroSD card.

If I had to rate this device I would give it a solid 7/10.

I'm here at the Toshiba seminar entitled 'Take a closer look'. When I return I will be giving you lucky people an insight into the latest technical goodies that they have on offer. I have to admit that there are some delightful little gems on offer and have some photos to prove it. It's a hard life being jetted to Paris, put up in a swanky hotel and let loose with some toys. It's a sacrifice I was prepared to take.

Recently I was asked to review the LG Viewty KU990 which I happily accepted. Over the past few days I have been using it as my main phone in order to find all the good and bad features about it as possible. I had previously used the phone for a few minutes and was quite impressed with it so I was looking forward to trying it out.

Initial thoughts

First of all I have heard a lot of people moan about the phones name. I don’t really see what is wrong with it, ok it probably isn’t the greatest name in the world but lets compare it to the other phone I use, the MDA Vario II (TyTn, SPV M3100 etc etc), that is defiantly no better plus it have about 4 other pseudonyms. Nokia has N95, E65, N73, 7373, Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition, etc while they may be useful names for people in the know, if I told my girlfriend I just got a new N810 she would look at me blankly and tell me to shut up. I’m no marketing expert but I assume LG want people to easily remember and identify the phone, and Viewty is a lot easier to remember than KU990.

When the phone arrived I was surprised how small the packaging was, it is supplied in a nice matt black box with all the accessories compartmentalised into smaller black boxes. The phone itself is very good looking with an all black body and silver edges. It is clear that LG are marketing this phone towards the style conscious, and I would go go so far to say it is one of the better looking phones in the market today.

The Viewty is rather large at 103.5mm tall, 54mm wide and 14.8mm thick but it is actually lighter than the smaller proportioned LG Shine at 112g and 119g respectively. However it is large for a reason, the phone comes with a 3.0 inch touch screen which occupies the majority of the front of the phone. It manages to display 262 thousand colours at 240 x 400 pixels. The large screen is obviously one of the main selling points of the phone with the majority the functions accessible via the touch screen interface.

On using the touch screen you will notice the phone provides vibration feedback, or haptic feedback as it is more formally known. Haptic technology refers to technology that provides feedback using the sense of touch. While it seems insignificant I really like haptic feedback, it basically replicates the push button feedback you receive from physical buttons and in doing so it improves the usability of the device.

The other feature that is noticeable when using the Viewty is that sweeping the finger across the screen is heavily used for navigation around the phone. Basically you use your finger to sweep through lists like text messages or emails. It took a little getting used to but it is quite intuitive so you should be sweeping through your emails in no time.

On the back side of the phone you have an impressive 5-megapixel camera, though this is not protected by a lens cover. The camera uses a xenon flash which should help provide decent photos in the darkest situations. There is also a weird little rocker on the side of the lens. At first I thought it was just for zoom, but after reading another review I found that it is used for in-call volume, and scrolling through menus as well.

On the right hand side of the phone there is a dedicated unlock key, which also acts as one of the camera keys. There is also the main camera key and a switch to switch between the various camera modes.

Performance

Call Quality.

While I found the call quality fine on my end there did seem to be some distortion and muffling on the other end, I tested the phone with an LG shine and a MDA Vario II. I personally didn’t think it was bad enough to hold against the phone but my girlfriend did complain a little. The loudspeaker is excellent, you can clearly hear people and I would say the loudspeaker quality was better than average. I did not try the video calling, I still find video calling rather gimmicky and to be honest I am not that interested in seeing the callers face as I speak to them.

Messaging / Interface

I have a tendency to text more than I phone, so I was expecting this area to be the biggest let down of the phone. There are 3 main interface options when texting. There is the usual T9 keypad, handwriting recognition and an onscreen keyboard.

As with most phones I have tried with handwriting recognition it is pretty poor. Most likely due to the fact my writing is appalling but it was basically unusable for myself, it would recognise the odd word but the majority would be completely wrong.

While I expected the onscreen keyboard to be too small to use I was quite impressed, it recognised the majority of keys I pressed and I was able to text reasonably fast on it. Unfortunately after a while I did find that I was hitting the wrong key a little too often for my liking and I resorted to the T9.

The T9 text input was perfectly fine, with the haptic feedback it was just as easy as typing on a real phone pad.

Camera

The camera on the phone was good, the pictures were clear and a xenon flash is infinitely better than an LED flash. The only minor problem I had was the response time between pressing the button to take the picture and the phone actually taking the picture was not as fast as I would like. The camera should provide a more than adequate substitute to a dedicated camera if needed.

The phone also has the ability to record video up to 120fps. 120fps is defiantly a bit of a gimmick but it is quite fun to record things in slow motion.

Email – Web

I normally use exchange for my email but was forced into setting up Pop3 for email on the phone. If you have a ISP provided email address than you need to make sure you have a proper SMTP server to be able to send emails. I was impressed with the email though; it was quite fast thanks to the HSDPA (3.5G) and was easy to read through thanks to the scrolling system.

Web browsing was also good thanks to the HSDPA and the nice large screen. The browser was superb; you view full size WebPages and sweep around using your finger.

There is no Wi-Fi on the phone, though this is not a huge issue for me as I rarely use it. I am on Web and Walk so I always connect via HSDPA.

I also found the modem function to be excellent. Once you install the LG software you need to select which service provider you use and click connect. That’s about all you have to do. In comparison I found connecting with my MDA Vario much more of a chore.

Music

The phone only comes with 90Mb of internal memory but it is upgradable via MicroSD. To listen to the music you must use the earphone adapter provided with the phone, this adapter also acts as the hands free microphone and radio aerial.

The music player was easy to use and the sound quality of the provided earphones was adequate. I did not have any higher quality earphones to hand as my V-Modas broke so I am unable to give a more accurate opinion on the sound quality provided from the phone.

I did not test the radio extensively but I managed to pick up radio 1 with little effort and it was quite clear.

I did find on 2 occasions the music randomly stopped playing, and the phone informed me that the files were corrupt. To amend this I had to remove the MicroSD card and insert it again which is quite frustrating as it required me to remove the back plate and battery first.

I would also have liked the phone to come with a proper 3.5mm headset socket built into it to negate the need of the hand free adaptor. Unfortunately this is a common problem with many phones.

Battery

LG quotes talk time battery life at 355 minutes using GSM only and 233 minutes using 3G only, and standby time at 434 hours using GSM and 454 hours using 3G. I didn’t really pay that much attention to it but I have charged it twice in about 4 days and I have used it quite a bit. Heavy browsing or music use will obviously require more battery charged.

Other points.

The phone managed to synch with my outlook very easily which is handy as I use exchange to manage most of my life.

The stylus is stupid, it looks like mascara. If LG want to include a stylus why didn’t they let it slide inside the phone?

The touch screen does get a bit mucky, but at the end of the day it is a touch screen what else do you expect.

Conclusion

I am a geek so I typically chose function over form and go for Symbian/WM based phones. However this phone has impressed me, it does all the functions I require out of a phone and it does them well. It is also a very good looking phone so will keep even the most style conscious person happy.

The camera is not as great as a standalone camera but it is very good for a phone camera and should satisfy most people.

While the phone is probably not the best phone in the world for my requirements it is good enough for me to retire my MDA Vario II and use the Viewty as my full time phone until I find an adequate replacement.

Phone Specification from LG after the jump.

The LG Viewty is available from Vodafone on pay monthly plans from £20

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