Stuff.tv reported today that the government has unveiled a “three strikes and your out” policy for illegal downloaders. Lord Mandelson confirmed at the government’s digital creative industries conference C&binet today, that the previously mentioned idea of cutting the internet connections of persistent filesharers could go ahead from the summer of 2011, and what an impact this would have if it went ahead.

It is important to note here though that if this did happen, then it would for sure be a “last resort” being issued after two warning letters beforehand.

Lord Mandelson commented “It must become clear that the days of consequence-free widespread online infringement are over,” he went on to add  ”Technical measures will be a last resort and I have no expectation of mass suspensions resulting.”

It would seem that the government are not trying to benefit from this, they are just simply trying to cut down on illegal activity and this comes from a widespread crackdown on it.

Do you think this is the right thing to do by the government or is this an area which the government should leave alone?

Via Stuff.tv [image source Stuff.tv]

Lord Mandelson Issues “three strikes and your out” Policy For Illegal Downloaders! is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Now pun intended here, but Nokia hasn’t been doing great over the last couple of years it has to be said, and in fact last quarter they lost $832 million according to theappleblog. So I can’t help but think that this is a little bad on Nokia’s image, as legal action that’s taken should have nothing to do with market share or how a company is performing etc. but if it does turn out that Apple have done something wrong, then of course Nokia will be right to sue. Nokia have added though that the reason behind this lawsuit is strictly on “principle only”.

According to theappleblog, the patents in question relate to GSM, UMTS, and wireless LAN standards covering “wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption.”

Nokia have actually come out and said that more than 40 big name companies have entered into wireless licensing agreements, however Apple still remain to be seen calling them “unprincipled”.

When I just read this, I thought to myself “but the iPhone has been out for years now….why has Nokia only just decided to do something?”. But after some research I found that Nokia did actually try or consider getting an injunction to stop Apple selling the iPhone in 2007, which eventually flopped. It has to be said though that Apple will probably settle in this situation, because one they have ongoing royality negotiations with Nokia on this topic and two it’s probably not worth the hassle and effort of trying to win, as this could affect Apple’s efforts in other areas.

My guess is that Apple knew that they were going to have to pay some royalties in some way or another to Nokia eventually and so they were pretty smart if you look at the figures. Apple have sold 21.17 million iPhone handsets as of Q2 2009, this adds up to some ridiculous amount of money for Apple and now they may owe at a guess around 10% of that to Nokia through royalties. This then at a low-end guess of around $10 per handset, means Apple will have gained somewhere around $189 million on the sale of just the iPhone….surely the royalties are just pocket change then?

Either way, it’s certainly a stepping stone for Nokia as I feel they really need to get back on track and soon!

Via theappleblog [image source: Apple]

Apple Sued Over iPhone….Is A War About To Start? is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Remember the tasty LG Chocolate, which was released a couple of years back from LG? Well it would seem that after its unrivalled success, LG are trying their hand again by introducing the LG Chocolate’s successor, the LG Chocolate BL40. We managed to get our hands on this slick and sexy new phone to see whether it can offer LG the same success as its older LG brother.

Review

The Second Generation Chocolate is a country mile away from it’s predecessor slider. A high-resolution flat widescreen is what display you get this time, and let me tell you it’s great. The BL40 is directed towards cinema-like movie playing (hence the large display) and desktop style internet browsing.

The first thing you notice….the BL40 is long, too long in fact. It’s actually a full 2cm longer than the iPhone, but if you don’t mind the joke of “what is that?” being asked 24/7 then you’ll benefit from it as it’s pretty good once you get used to it….honest! On the positive side of it being freakishly long, it looks great and the typical Black Label Series build quality is there, with sleek black front and back panelling with a red top and bottom….lovely.

LG’s previous attempts at a touchscreen phone the Arena KM900 and the Viewty Smart GC900 looked good, but not half as good as the BL40 looks it really is a cracker!

‘Strangely unique’, is how I would describe the design of the LG chocolate. For example LG have packed the phone into a thin piano-black chassis, and it just looks different to any other black phone I have ever seen….which is a surprisingly relief!

So back to that screen. Before we start it will be the talking point of many a jokes so I won’t try to hide that it does look strange from you, but if you can look past it then you’ll be on to a winner. The 4″, 800×345 resolution display has a 21:9 aspect ratio as I said earlier, it’s just like your watching a movie in a mini cinema (if you want a comparison). When working in landscape mode, this means the screen is considerably wider than it is tall. That turns out to be both a good thing and a bad thing in the end….let’s go into this because it’s important.

It’s a positive thing for a number of important reasons. Firstly, the extra width means you can view movies in their natural 21:9 aspect ratio, with the result that they look absolutely brilliant and quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen on a phone, especially as the display is very bright and has a reasonably high resolution of 800×345 pixels. The extra width has also allowed LG to introduce a neat split-screen view in the messaging applications, something I’ve not seen on a phone before: contacts are listed on the left-hand side, with messages appearing on the right, just like with standard PC applications which appears very neat. It also means Web pages fit across the screen without you having to scroll back and forth, as you must with pretty much every other smart phone around and this can be very annoying.

The downsides are that, as the display is also very narrow lengthways, so when you do view web pages in landscape mode, the rendered text is very small and appears quite difficult to read unless you have pitch perfect vision. Consequently, you usually find yourself having to zoom in to increase the text size to a more acceptable level and this gets tedious quickly. This defeats the purpose of having the wider screen which is a major feature of the phone, as, once you zoom in, you then have to scroll back and forth, just as you do on other devices so there’s no difference. Also, when you use the landscape keyboard in the browser, email or SMS applications, it practically fills the entire screen, leaving just a couple of lines of text at the top and this can be a nightmare when you want to look at what you’ve wrote. I can’t help but say that LG may have been better off just making the screen in landscape mode bigger because then all these problems would be solved.

LG’s fun S-Class interface has been tweaked to embrace the BL40’s web utilities, and it certainly differs from that on the Arena for example. The very first time I turned on the phone I was very impressed with the layout and how the menu works and it made me want to explore a lot more. Sadly though it didn’t last and I kept on finding different things that I felt just didn’t work as well as they could of. For example from the main menu you can look at it either in normal or landscape mode, now in normal mode it looks fine with well designed icons etc. but in landscape mode,  i can only describe it as a disaster as there’s literally 32 menu icons to choose from and it just looks too clustered. After about 30 minutes of rooting around on the phone I just wanted my simple Samsung U600 menu back if I’m totally honest.

A quick note on on the SMS side of things, which as with all phones nowadays is a key ingredient in the consumers eyes and it’s not bad. The only thing I would say is that in normal mode it feels a little sluggish and in landscape mode the keys just look and feel too cramped together, which often results in pressing the wrong buttons. Saying that it still works fine, and actually once I’d got used to the landscape version of texting then it worked just fine.

LG should be given some sort of medal for the amount of features they’ve managed to pack into this handset. Connectivity is great, with quad-band support, as well as HSDPA and Wi-Fi for fast Internet access. There’s on-board GPS, which is very quick to find your position, Bluetooth with A2DP support for wireless audio streaming to stereo headsets, and an FM transmitter so you can beam music to a car stereo or home hi-fi will relative ease.

The handset is equipped with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, so you can easily swap out the supplied stereo headset for your own headphones, this is something I’ve not seen much of on phones but I think it’s a good addition. Audio playback sounds top-notch from both the music player and the video player. As well as being compatible with the usual mobile-video formats, the handset supports both the DivX and Xvid formats which is obviously a great thing as you can watch more films without the need to convert them to the usual 3GP format.

Onto the camera then and it’s a level above those found on the likes of the iPhone. It’s got 5-megapixel resolution, autofocus and an LED flash, what more could you ask for on a phone? The camera can also shoot video (30 frames per second at VGA resolution), and there’s a neat little video editor on-board that you can use to knock your clips into shape but I don’t see why this is there although it is cool I guess.

Battery life is neither good or bad it’s about the same as what you’d expect from a smartphone of this caliber, a charge needed after about 36 hours of normal usage.

The Gaj-It Verdict

Design: 9/10
Usability: 7/10
Features: 9/10

We Say

So where to finish?

After roughly two weeks worth of testing….I actually grew to love this phone. First I liked it, then a few setbacks led me to feel a little let down by it and then after constant usage for about two weeks I did….love it.

The BL40 does have it’s problems and they will be annoying but after a while, I for one certainly found that the negatives were far outweighed by the positives. The only thing that puts me off not wanting to go out and buy one of these phones for myself is the user interface, the S-Class menu system is annoying and unresponsive at times, and in general feels over engineered in the sense that it was trying to be “an iPhone killer”.

It is a great phone, I just don’t know if it’s as good as the iPhone or HTC Hero. It certainly has features that are on a par with both and in some cases better but does this justify?….I don’t think so.

Launch Price: £450 (Sim Free)

Buy here: Mobile Deal Finder

Review: LG Chocolate BL40….Bigger Is Better! is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

TVCatchup got itself into trouble with TV broadcasters last year after offering a free program recording service, which it was then forced to suspend after its hosting was terminated by its ISP for legal reasons according to pocket-lint

It won’t work outside of the UK unfortunately, probably due to legal reasons, but  it claims that it’s completely legitimate and should have no problems this time around with broadcasters.

02 does have the right to block 3G video streaming sites so it might not be long before TVCatchUp gets blocked. 02 promotes the use of these sites over wi-fi but lots of users of this service over 3G would put a huge strain on its network. I hope it doesn’t as its a great servers and highly recommend users try it. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch then give it a go and let us know what you think as this could be a big hit amongst users we think!

Via pocket-lint via TechCrunch [image source: TVCatchup]

TVCatchup For the iPhone is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Previously users had to purchase and download music from 7 Digital’s site, and had to right click a track to see if it was even available for a start, following a number of steps from there on in to actually get the track.

Now, there will be a “buy” button next to all tracks and albums available for purchase (so not all the tracks are available yet which is a shame), that will allow you to buy tracks from within Spotify itself which as you can imagine makes life a lot simpler. Once you click the buy button, you will need to click to agree to some terms and conditions jargon as you do with most purchases online, and then you’ll be presented with a payment page for you to enter your card details. Once you’ve completed this stage the track will download while you continue browsing if you wish. A snazzy added extra with this update is that all bought tracks will be playable within Spotify under a “Purchases” heading on the Spotify sidebar and this will look different to the rest of your playlists, it will of course be ad-free and can be transferred to MP3 players if you wish or whatever device plays mp3′s and you can listen to your favorite songs on the move!

I for one am a bit anxious about this move from Spotify, as for one they are now directly competing with iTunes which will take some beating and two how difficult and time-consuming will it be to actually purchase the songs….we will see!

Whatever happened to the rumor that Spotify was going out of business?

Will you be using this new feature? Or will you just be using it for free music streaming like many other millions of people?

[image source: Spotify]

Spotify Adds One-Click Purchasing is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Jailbreaking the iPhone has always been a problem ever since it’s initial release. It seems now though that Apple have finally decided to do something about it and this is what they’ve done!

Developers apparently use 24kpwn to jailbreak the iPhone but apparently the new models aren’t vulnerable to this. If you want a new 3GS  and want to jailbreak it then you would be well advised to buy an older stocked model to make sure it’s vulnerable to this, otherwise you may not be able to! Another option would be to buy a refurbished model!

My bet is that there will be other ways to jailbreak the iPhone, it just has not been found yet by developers and it probably won’t take long for them too either!

Have you jailbroke your iPhone? Would you recommend it?

Via boygeniusreport [image source: Apple]

iPhone 3GS….Now Shipped Immune To Jailbreaking! is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

The most eagerly anticipated game this year….bar none is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and it just so happens that this is the game that leads the Christmas number one odds, and it’s not even been released yet!

The Sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, this game intends to stretch the boundaries of console gaming to new limits and I think it’s going to do it with ease. Call of Duty 4 was the top selling game worldwide in 2007 and from a lot of experience of playing that game myself I hope along with the millions and millions of others that it’s sequel will be absolutely dazzling. (Out on November 10th)

A quick look at the odds then and as we’ve just heard Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 leads the pack with odds of 13/8. Second and closely behind is the second installment of Assassin’s Creed at 9/4 which could turn out to be a good bet. A few outside bets now in the shape of ever popular FIFA 10 at 6/1 and Halo 3: ODST at 10/1 which could get yourself a pretty penny if they were to become Christmas number 1!

In all honestly though and being serious for just one second, I can’t look past Call of Duty to make the Christmas number one spot purely because the original Modern Warfare game was so good and there is an incredibly large fan-base for the series so I’m pretty sure that will wrap it up spick and span!

Come on Infinity Ward!

Via Stuff.tv [image source: Wikipedia]

Call Of Duty Leads Crimbo Tussle! is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Now it pains me to say this because I love Apple don’t get me wrong, but with the iPhone I wont purchase one simply because they are too expensive in my opinion. And I don’t want to disappoint anyone, but if your sat there reading rumors that an iPhone price war might go ahead because the iPhone has just received wider distribution, it’s very unlikely to happen because sharp drops in price would lead to the operators making next to no money on the handset.

Due to this it was back to the drawing board for me, as i attempted to write a list about why the iPhone is so popular and why it’s rival phones just aren’t cutting it right now. My conclusion was that the iPhone is actually too good if that makes sense, as the feature rich phone is practically the only phone in the last few years that was totally brand new and brought something dazzling to the market. You just don’t see anything new nowadays. Sure you see new handsets from mobile giants that make you believe they could be the next big thing in rumors, but then you see it and have a play with it and you realise that it’s just the same old phone you’ve had for the last 10 years with a major facelift.

This begs the question about the iPhone….why is it so popular and what did Apple do to make it so good? Well in truth, Apple invested a lot of money in the iPhone design which could of been a disaster but it turns out they found something innovative. Anybody who has been on an iPhone will know that it can still do the things any normal phone can do such as txt, ring people and access the internet but it’s in the design where it stands out. No menu as such, 3G, the App Store, an iPod and the iTunes Store are just a handful of things that make the iPhone unique.

I believe this is where Mobile Giants such as Nokia, Blackberry and Samsung are going wrong in the release of their new phones. None of these “iPhone killers” have got enough to excite consumers and make a difference in the market as the companies have not invested as much time and effort as Apple did in bringing out the iPhone. I think this is where the problems lie for Apple’s opposition.

What do you think? Do you think Apple did start a new era of handsets with the iPhone or do you think Apple were just lucky at the time? We’d love to hear your opinion!

[image source: Apple]

Tesco Direct (£440.00)

iPhone Killers Just Not Strong Enough….Yet! is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

DigiTimes reported this morning that Foxconn will be the sole manufacturer for the device, citing “market sources.” The device is expected to be for sale in the first quarter of 2010 or somewhere around this time, with an alleged initial shipment of 300,000 to 400,000 devices. No price was given in the report.

A key part in the report was:  ”The sources indicated they believe the tablet PC features will focus more on e-book functionality rather than music, and that based on Apple’s marketing strategy, long battery life, quick Internet connectivity and an easy-to-use user interface will be key features of the device,”. It also claimed that the device will sport a 10.6-inch display which would look great, and offered speculation that Foxconn may obtain panels for the tablet from its Innolux Display.

DigiTimes also reports that HP will follow suit shortly after with a similar product of its own in the second quarter of 2010 (why doesn’t someone get one in the market before Apple does? Surely this would be a smart idea?). Add to that the recent emergence of Microsoft’s courier device that we don’t know much about, and we have what looks like the beginning of a brand new hardware product category….hopefully this will lead on to bigger and better things in the future!

Depending on Apple’s price point, whether it intends to or not, I see this product and others like it eating away at the netbook’s market share and may have a very detrimental effect on the market. In the end, I think the rumors we have all heard about the Tablet and other’s like it is exactly what people want in order to compete against a stylish netbook. But again as with most things in this industry, price will make all the difference, and if Apple tries to create a new niche for this product by pricing it out of the netbook market, it could have a hard sell on its hands so I say to Apple….think smart!

Via TUAW[image source: Foxxconn]

Will Foxconn Manufacture Apple Tablet? is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Since then Apple have gone through several mouses that each time expanded what a mouse could do. In recent years they have looked into multi-touch technologies, and this is what is expected to come into the new mouse when it is released.

Apple have had a busy year, and it’s not going to get any easier with the imminent release of the new iMac’s. It is expected then that we will see the new mouse technology as early as next year in conjunction with the release of the new iMac. Let’s have a look at the history of the Apple “mouse” and where it could/ should go from here.

The Timeline

Apple’s mouse’s haven’t been great, in fact the last few have been a big disappointment which largely contrasts to the successes of the iMac and MacBook.

As you can see in the picture below, the original iMac’s “hockey puck” mouse was introduced in 1998 and was considered a flop. It wasn’t until 2000 when it got dropped for the Pro Mouse, which used clear plastics in solid white or black with optical LED tracking, which got rid of the troublesome track-ball. Then came 2005 where we saw the first “Mighty Mouse”, a flat white product that featured four independently configurable buttons the roller ball, the thumb and finger pinch button and two sensitive area for right and left clicks. In 2006 a Bluetooth version started shipping.

A new Mighty Mouse

To keep Apple at the forefront of consumer buying, it is expected that Apple will have to address their problematic rollerball that we see on the Mighty Mouse today as this is often what stirs up the argument between Windows and Mac users about which is best. Touch sensitive housing and multi-point touch detection is expected to be the main features of the new mouse.

Another interesting point here is that should Apple decide to launch their new mouse alongside their new iMac’s, then it wouldn’t be too far off scale to think that they will have an aluminum appearance to replace the white plastic we currently see, as this would match the already upgraded line of laptops and possibly the new desktops.

I personally like the Mighty Mouse, but I’m not one to say that it didn’t have it’s flaws, hopefully the new mouse will be good!

What do you think the Apple’s new mouse will feature? Or what do you think it should feature to eliminate it’s common flaws of the past?

Via AppleInsider [image source: AppleInsider]

Apple Plans Mighty Mouse Makeover…. is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com