Today I’m proud to announce our new mobile phone deals website .

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Announcing – Our Mobile Phone Deals site

Today I’m proud to announce our new mobile phone deals website . Working in partnership with The Blog House I wanted somewhere where you guys could search all those thousands of tariffs on all the networks and find the best deal.

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Announcing – Our Mobile Phone Deals site

Today we got some quality hands-on time with the HTC Legend after we sneaked a peek yesterday. We compared it our Android benchmark – the HTC Hero. The design is similar in some ways, but not in others. The Legend is built from a single piece of aluminium for a seamless compact frame. It’s solid, cool and smooth to touch. There’s less buttons but a whole lot more inside. The HTC Sense interface has been boosted and you now get HTC Widgets updated frequently – just click for more widgets and it’ll bring down all the new ones that are available.

During our chat with Eric Lin from HTC we were amazed yet again by the tiny but important things HTC have done. The battery is removable (see iPhone, it CAN be done) – it slides out of the small black panel at the bottom, as does the SIM and the microSD. This is like a ship in a bottle – the battery cover itself is the antenna. Talk about space-saving, this really is cutting edge.

The Hero track-ball is gone, but the optical joystick just.. worked. It clicks too, so you can select stuff and it still does the “glowing light” trick to tell you when texts and emails have arrived etc.

Coming to Vodafone in April 2010 this is one very, very nice handset. While we were there we asked HTC about the Flash support within Android – sometimes not all websites using Flash display correctly. The reason? It’s memory. Most Flash bits will work, but if you’ve got a huge Flash game or similar then it won’t display. I guess I’d rather have that than the whole thing grinding to a halt.

We also wanted to get a look at our other worry – the camera quality. I can, at last, confirm that this camera is brilliant. I was in a dark room (as you can see) and took a snap. I didn’t hold it steady, I didn’t fiddle with the settings – it produced a perfect shot. Ahhhh.. I’m liking this and can’t wait to get more time with it.

So, to the pictures – we’ve got another stack of close-up shots plus comparison shots with the HTC Hero. Oh, and if that’s not enough we’ve got all the phones side-by-side.

Video is coming soon..

Links – HTC Legend Hands-on (2) – HTC Hero Comparison – All devices

Read on and add your comments. Follow us on twitter too.

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HTC Legend – Hands on (again)

These days it’s not really a big deal to read about a yet announced mobile handset that someone has previewed. In fact we’ve come to expect it. The latest to make the cut is the Kurara touchscreen handset form Sony Ericsson.

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Sony Ericsoon Kurara, still unannounced, gets previewed

These days it’s not really a big deal to read about a yet announced mobile handset that someone has previewed. In fact we’ve come to expect it. The latest to make the cut is the Kurara touchscreen handset form Sony Ericsson.

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Sony Ericsoon Kurara, still unannounced, gets previewed

Ever have that experience when you need to use the toilet on a journey and it’s locked with no sign of a key anywhere? Well the Finnish Road Administration has devised a brilliant, albeit slightly skewed notion of using your mobile phone to not only open the toilet door, but pay for the use of facilities as well.

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Techno-toilet needs SMS to open and for payment

The venerable 2001 classic of an OS, Windows XP, strikes again. The scribes over at Laptop have put together a rather damning battery life comparison between old greybeard and the fresh Windows 7, which finds that on average netbooks get 47 minutes less battery life with the upgraded software. In the case of the ASUS 1008HA, that deficit was a meaty 57 minutes, or 16.7%. Liliputing and jkOnTheRun have run their own tests which invariably reached the same conclusion. Adding these data to an earlier comparison with Snow Leopard, where Windows 7 was again markedly worse than its competitor, leads us to the conclusion that perhaps Microsoft’s 7th heaven hasn’t quite been optimized for the mobile mavens out there… yet.

Read – Stick with XP? Windows 7 Battery Life Worse on Netbooks
Read – Windows 7 + netbooks = lower battery life?
Read – Netbook Battery Tests: Windows XP vs Windows 7

Filed under: Laptops, Software

Windows 7 bested by XP in netbook battery life tests originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows 7 bested by XP in netbook battery life tests

China Ontrade calls this the iPhone 4 Generation Midboard. Not very exciting, but the last time they announced a next-generation iPhone part, they were right. A month later, the iPhone 3GS appeared with exactly those parts. What could this mean?

The iPhone 3GS display

Let’s review what we know: When we first covered China Ontrade’s iPhone 3G 2009 parts—back in May 2009—we thought they looked real. Since they didn’t have any track record, we treated it as a rumor. Potentially true, but a rumor. The iPhone 3GS announcement was going to happen that summer, so it was logical that factories had already manufactured parts for the assembled iPhone 2009. That is, in fact, what China Ontrade claimed in their site:

This is great honor for China Ontrade (HK) chinaontrade.com to be the 1st started to supply iphone 3gen 2009 parts directly from factory

In June 2009, the actual iPhone 3GS teardown confirmed that China Ontrade’s parts were indeed the real McCoy. Somehow, the Chinese wholesaler’s ninjas—who sell spare parts for all Apple iPod and iPhone products—got the next generation pieces one month before the product reached the streets.

Zoom in to see the comparison of the May 2009 and June 2009 parts.

Apple iPhone 4 Generation

Now, China Ontrade is claiming that this iPhone midboard belongs to the next-generation iPhone 4, which in theory is supposed to come out next summer, like all the previous iPhones. If confirmed, this means they have the piece about eight months before the actual iPhone 2010 release. That seems like an awfully long time for any factory to produce parts for a new product. Like every company out there, Apple’s products are built just-in-time to avoid stock congestion or last minute changes. They don’t have parts ready eight months before release.

Does this mean that a new iPhone 4 may appear in a month too? That seems crazy, and very unlikely. After all, we know that Phil Schiller said that the Apple holiday lineup was set. Some people argue that this means that the holiday lineup is set, but it hasn’t been fully announced yet. However, for now we can only speculate about the true meaning of his words, and the fact that Apple called us to tell us an exact quote to publish.

Some may argue that they have important reasons to accelerate the introduction of a new iPhone. One is gaining more strength lately, despite Apple’s domination of the cell market: Google’s Android. Even while Apple COO Tim Cook dismissed Android—saying that Google phones “are still just trying to catch up with the first iPhone two years ago”—the media mindshare is certainly shifting. Thanks to the latest batch of Android 2.0 cellphones, people are starting to look at Android with different eyes.

For now we can’t assume any of this means a new iPhone is around the corner. After all, the 3GS just came out five months ago. The only thing we know is that China Ontrade’s claims were true in the past, so it’s logical to assume this is an actual iPhone 4 generation part. But this makes little sense given Apple’s manufacturing practices and self-imposed yearly-upgrade cycle, so this may all be a publicity ploy. Especially because they claim they will publish actual shots of the product in their web site.

There’s one last implication in all this: Maybe this is the real Apple “iTablet” SIM tray, after all. [China On Trade]

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This Is a Next-Generation iPhone 4 Part, China Ontrade Claims [Rumor]

If you still do not convinced that an SSD upgrade is really beneficial in terms of overall performance like I am already, here is another comparison. I have upgraded an old but still sexy Thinkpad X40 with an SSD and the result is awesome. Also just recent…

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HDD Compared To SSD On Acer Aspire One D250 Netbook

INTERVIEW: How maps will be free and satnavs much cheaper
OpenStreetMap - Crowd sourced cartography set to re-map the world 0

The Ordnace Survey is paid for by the tax payer – serveral times over as it goes. So, why is it that we foot a further fee to Great Britain’s national mapping agency every time we buy a satnav or even an A-Z?

If you purchase a TomTom, approximately 20-30% of that cost goes to Tele Atlas who licenses the maps that TomTom and many other hardware manufacturers use. Part of that charge is because Tele Atlas itself, and the company’s main rival Navteq, have to buy the data from national mapping agencies in the first place, like the Ordance Survey, and then stitch all the information together. Hence the consumer having to pay on a number of levels. It was this and many more nuggets of mapping gold that Pocket-lint picked up on when we stopped in for a drink with Steve Coast, the founder of the collaborative, free and editable world map, the OpenStreetMap.

The aim of the project is to bring to the mapping world what Wikipedia brought to encyclopedias. The main troubles with the current system are that it’s expensive for the end user and it’s inaccurate. Tele Atlas and Navteq know that they’re inaccurate. They say so themselves. It’s because they can only update the roads every 12-18 months when they send one of their vans round with a GPS to check. They also know that they’re inaccurate because they put inaccuracies in on purpose to make sure people aren’t using their maps without permission.

OpenStreetMap circumvents these problems by crowd sourcing the data rather than buying it from agencies. The data can then be passed on for free, in the true open source sense, and it’s also constantly self-updated. The results are marked if you look at the differences between OSM and Google Maps with its Tele Atlas supplied information.

“Take London’s parks for example,” says Coast as he gestures to the city behind us. “On Google maps, there are no names on the paths going across Hyde Park and some of them appear to go through ponds and lakes. There’s even one marked as a carriage way that you can drive down. The difference is that Tele Atlas uses vans to check their routes and they can’t drive through Hyde Park. OpenStreetMap uses people.”

It’s not just the level of road detail either. The OSM community maps cyclepaths, hiking trails, pubs, recycle points, shops and even trees and lamposts. Users can add any level of information at all, it’s just a question of which of it is displayed on the viewed copy.

“Think of the data we have as a soup and it just depends on which parts we call on for each map. You can use a section called the style editor to change preferences. So, a company like Virgin might want to change all the colours of the roads to red for their commerical maps. They can do that because there’s complete access to all the data and the only restrictions are like those for Linux – you have to credit OSM at the bottom and send us any information on any improvements you make.”

The system, of course, relies on the community being willing to do the leg work and that’s perhaps where the comparison with Wikipedia ends. It’s a lot easier to get someone to update an article from home than it is to send them out with a GPS. It also brings the community’s location into account.

“Most of Africa, that’s a black spot for us,” confesses Coast, palms up. “That’s the case for much of the Developing World. People just don’t have the equipment, and in the UK, the Medway towns aren’t so good for us. It’s just very hard to get people interested in some places.”

That said, if you take a look at what Google Maps comes up with for Africa, there’s not a hell of a lot there either, and, in fact, choosing the city of Windhoek in Namibia and Zomba in Malawi at random, OSM has more to offer. Places of high conflict are also far better covered in OSM. They’re the only agency to have maps of Baghdad. You wouldn’t get many Tele Atlas or Navteq drivers volunteering for that job.

Germany has also been a huge success story for OSM. Although the term is relative, it will be the first country that the service considers “complete” as of later this year. There are huge numbers of enthusiasts in the country and they hold mapping parties of up to 40 people who’ll turn up, get given a GPS device and return later that day when the group has covered an area. It’s also a way to introduce people to the community and shown how to get the GPS data onto the system. So why do people do it?

“It’s addicitive. People really get into it. A friend of mine described it as like dot-to-dot for stoners but it’s more than that. There’s a certain civic responsibility that people take on. They like to make things correct. There’s something in the pride of getting your part of the map right.”

But it’s not just Europe who’ve picked up the bug.

“I was giving someone a demonstration of OSM on my laptop and asked them to name any city in the world. I was a little worried when they asked to see Havana, Cuba, but when we got there, we discovered an absolutely stunning map of the city – one of the best I’ve seen.”

The project started while Coast was a student at UCL, who continue to host the OSM for free today. Orginally reading Computer Sciences and later switching to Physics, he found some time to have a look at a few of the university’s gadgets.

“I was playing around in the VR labs with augemented reality and a got hold of a GPS device. I started plotting all sorts of points in space and then when I tried to put them on a map, discovered how many hurdles there were to getting the data.”

He now lives in San Francisco where he’s also started a more directly money making business in the shape of CloudMade – a tiling service that hosts the OSM maps more reliably than the UCL servers for mobile phone apps and other enterprises to use. In fact, if you go to the White House website, you’ll see an OSM map there, as provided by CloudMade.

The brilliant part about crowd sourcing mapping data is that, unlike Wikipedia articles, there’s less of a chance of bias. There’s no opinion involved. Either a road is there or it isn’t. The only issues have been over road naming in the disputed area of Northern Cyprus and the odd bit of accidental map graffiti.

So, what of the future of OSM? Where does Coast want this to go and exactly what’s in it for him as the founder of a not for profit organisation with 150,000 active users?

“The plan is to overtake Tele Atlas and Navteq. It’s coming for them and it’ll hit them hard like it did for the guys at Encyclopedia Britannica when Wikipedia grew. I want OSM to become the biggest mapping service in the world.”

Once positioned, such a company would doubtless sell for huge sums with so many location-based services, hardware manufacturers and end users involved. It’s unlikely, that OSM will ever provide a Street View in the way that Google has with the need of so many millions of pictures to be taken on specialised cameras but Yahoo have already donated their satellite maps to help out and the third largest mapping service, behind NavTeq and TeleAtlas, AND, kindly gifted all of the Netherlands to the OSM in 2007, anything’s possible. Coasy doesn’t even rule out buying data, should it be the right deal. The other area in which the service can move would be adding reviews to the map annotations. Again, perhaps another company might save the OSM editors some legwork there too.

Whichever path it takes, it’s easy to see how OSM can become an incredibly powerful player in software and services and on the internet as a whole. It’s hard to tell whether the growing community will snowball quite the same way as it did for Wikipedia but there’s certainly plenty of good reasons for Tele Atlas and Navteq to be looking over their shoulders. Roll on the mapping revolution.

OpenStreetMap – Crowd sourced cartography set to re-map the world originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:31:53 +0100

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NEWS: OpenStreetMap – Crowd sourced cartography set to re-map the world