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Archive for September, 2010

Ila Dusk Personal Alarm

Friday, September 17th, 2010

Ila DUSK Alarm

Summer is now coming to an end which can only mean one thing, it will be getting dark earlier. I have found a great product to give you the confidence to keep your head high while out in the dark.

I’m sure we have all seen or been bought a ugly personal alarm which we have either, left at the bottom of our bag where we would never get to it in an emergency or still in the box in your bedside draw.

Prezzybox.com have launched the Ila DUSK Personal Alarm which is not only practical but stylish. The ila products are designed as fashion accessories, to look and work better than anything else on the market. Other than looking great, the main benefit of the ila DUSK is that it’s an innovative personal safety alarm that emits an ear piercing female scream that will shock and disorientate an attacker, alert passers-by and give the victim precious seconds to run away.

A lot of women lose their voices when attacked, and the ila Dusk gives them a voice back. It looks like a chic fashion accessory and it can be worn as a key chain or on a bag so is always close at hand.

My only concerns with this alarm is that having it hanging from your bag may mean you catch it on something which could cause embaressment when a female scream starts! Also I’m not sure if finding my personal alarm would be the first thing on my mind when being attacked but if I no I have something to hand which will give me a voice when I’m in that situation it may well be worth it.

Avaliable from Prezzybox.com and retails at £19.95

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The half pint sized Kodak PlaySport

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Kodak Playsport

Although Summer is nearing its end, the winter holiday season is about to begin and what better to share your skills on the slopes or winter sun snaps with then with the Kodak PlaySport. The pocket sized camera has been available for a few months now and as us lucky ladies at GirlsnGadgets have been having fun with Kodak’s mini camcorder. At around £129, the PlaySport offers a lot for your money and for much less then some of its other counterparts. But does its low price mean it lets us down on features …

Described by Kodak as one for the ‘adrenaline junkies’ amongst us, on paper the handheld certainly offers some great qualities. The device boasts 1080p HD recording, 4x digital zoom, image stabilization, water resistant up to 3m (10ft) and 128MB expandable memory. It is also a fun and attractive light weight device coming in a range of colours including purple, black, white and blue.

With our love for capturing our favourite moments both in video and photo, this device is the perfect addition to a night out or day at the beach and with its additional durability, it is also one that you would feel safe enough not to get damaged. The camera does have many competitors out there though and many more coming to the table … could a new PlaySport be on the cards for the Christmas shoppers?

So what could Kodak add to the device to make it more likely to appear on our Christmas list this year … well first of all a larger screen would be great, I love having a quick preview of my snaps/videos straight away, and the small screen on this model makes it difficult. As an iPhone user, I have grown accustom to a large screen that I can chuckle at on the move
and share with those unlucky enough to have been captured on the device. Building on that, touch screen would be a cool addition too, possibly with some on board editing to boot and direct internet uploading to say YouTube/Facebook … or maybe I am getting ahead of myself.

Regardless, this is a fab little device and one that we have had lots of fun with here … all in all I would give it a very respectable 8/10. The quality of the results is surprisingly good and definitely gets my thumbs up.

What do you get in the box?

KODAK PLAYSPORT Video Camera
KODAK Li-Ion Rechargeable Digital Camera Battery KLIC-7004
Adapter and cable for charging
HDMI and AV cables
Wrist strap
User Guide
ARCSOFT MEDIA IMPRESSION Software for Kodak (on-camera)

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Orange transforming volunteering by harnessing the power of mobile

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Large corporations are in the perfect position to champion change, but often times it’s “not in the budget” or simply not in line with their agenda. With the social media spotlight now shining hotly, consumers demand greater transparency from these companies — and we’re seeing changes left and right.

Orange seems to be up with the trend, and have harnessed the power of mobile to transform volunteering. In the UK, Orange provides GSM coverage to 99% of the UK population, with more than 16.442 million active mobile customers — so, they have quite the crowd-sourcing opportunity.

Announced last month, Orange launched a project to turn your down-time into social good time by introducing “snack size” volunteering options to customers through their mobile phones. Think about what you could do with those extra 5 minutes you have while waiting for the bus, or if you’re on a break!

The goal here, besides doing some good, is to help charities save thousands of pounds every year. How? Well, you could give them access to millions of people’s opinions, map local community amenities and services or even give disabled people access and insight to places in a new way.

The project is currently in its first phase, crowd-sourcing new ideas through a newly launched community at mobilevolunteering.co.uk. Their hope is for the exploration of ideas surrounding the concept of mobile volunteering through community discussions and collaborative development.

Although I’m based in the US, and cannot submit any ideas, I am able to join the community and offer feedback. I decided to join to take a look around. Everyone gets a profile, making it easy to connect with the community as well as making it easy to keep track of the ideas you’re following. Orange encourages interaction by offering up Foursquare-style badges for adding comments, filling out your bio, and fostering conversation amongst other things.

The clean site makes it easy to explore the project — they’ve really hit the mark with drawing in, and encouraging interaction within the community.

In the end, Orange’s goal is to round up their 10 favorite volunteer actions that can be completed on a mobile and develop them into one amazing app for volunteering and social good.

Stuart Jackson, Brand Communications Director for Orange at Everything Everywhere says:

“We’re taking responsibility as a company for maximising the true potential of the mobile phone – to see how it can be used to empower consumers to do acts-of-good whilst on the move.

“In trying to crowd-source these ideas, we’ll develop this concept in collaboration with top industry experts to ensure that the end product has a very real impact on UK society. It is an exciting vision that builds on our heritage of innovation whilst at the same time aims to inspire millions of people to give just minutes of their time – making a massive difference to UK society.”

Well said. My hat off to Orange — I look forward to the final 10, and I can only hope that one of the large wireless companies here in the US takes note. (I’m lookin’ at you, AT&T.)

If you’re a developer, charity or social entrepreneur and would like to join in, make sure to head to mobilevolunteering.co.uk.

Tags: crowdsourcing, mobile, Orange, volunteering
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Cosmo Update: Highly Commended Gadget Tech Blog

Monday, September 13th, 2010

From everyone here at Girls n Gadgets, we’d like to thank all of our readers for supporting us in the Cosmopolitan Blog Awards. We didn’t win unfortunately, however we came second and so we were ‘Highly Commended’ in the Gadget/ Tech Category.First place went to our friend Nikki over at Girl Geek Chic and was well deserved! Congratulations Nikki!

The presentation of the awards was an early morning affair. Held at ‘Sketch’, just off Regent Street, attendees were welcomed with refreshments including a fruit skewer that had some of the biggest blackberries I’ve ever seen!

The presentation of the awards were brief, although it was nice to see the blogs, along with comments that readers had made when voting, beamed up on the walls. The awards, which were sponsored by Collection 2000, received a total of over 15,000 votes. Winners of each category will get the opportunity to blog or write an article for the magazine.

Congratulations to all the winners and highly commended blogs!

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Wii remotes for the wee ones!

Monday, September 13th, 2010

The Wii as we all know is very much a family orientated game. There’s been a few variations in controllers – driving wheels, tennis bats and even golf clubs!

The Wii remotes always struck me as being a little big for younger children, always having to stretch to the buttons when using it with one hand. For a console that’s mainly aimed at young kids, this is somewhat of a design flaw.

Minii Me, have produced an entire range of Wii remotes from the remote and nunchuck (£9.95) to the wheel (£4.95), light sword (£8.95) and other sports add-ons (9.95) (including Wii Resorts mega pack! £14.95). Retailing at £24.95 for the main remote and the additional packs at very reasonable prices, this is the perfect present to make your little ones feel special!

I tried out the main remote along with steering wheel on my 5 year old step son. They were an instant hit. Setting up is the same process as with the normal size remotes. After hours of play, on Lego Star Wars no less, they performed very well. The only thing I noted whilst observing play, was the lack of connectivity when the batteries started to run low.

Overall, they were a big hit with the little one. You could clearly see the difference between usage of the remotes. For those with young childeren, I would say this is a must have. 8/10

Available for www.prezzybox.com

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Lady Geek TV – Catchup #8 & #9

Monday, September 13th, 2010

Due to a hugely busy schedule last week, we were unable to update you on the latest Lady Geek TV episodes. Check them both out here:

Episode #8 – How do you turn your smartphone into your Personal Assistant?

Lady Geek TV finds the apps that keep you productive

Your co-worker has gone on holiday. The other one is off with flu. Suddenly, you’re drowning in a sea of sticky notes while frantically trying to type a letter before hopping into a cab for that meeting and wait, is that your boss heading this way? Don’t crawl under your desk with a sympathetic chocolate bar – Lady Geek TV have found the apps to keep you productive under pressure.

This week, Lady Geek test Quickoffice Suite (www.quickoffice.com) to ensure you are mobile and ready for action by letting you view and edit documents on the go. We also test one of your favourites, Remember the Milk (www.rememberthemilk.com), together with Evernote (www.evernote.com), which help to keep you organised, calm, collected and on top of Mount Sticky-Note.

Get in touch before 10 am on Friday 3rd September and you can win a gorgeous Nokia E72. All you need to do is ‘like’ our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/ladygeektv or follow us at http://twitter.com/ladygeektv.

The Lady Geeks look forward to hearing from you.

Episode #9 Can your phone improve your taste in music?

www.ladygeektv.com
www.facebook.com/ladygeektv
www.twitter.com/ladygeektv

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Pokemon Heart Gold & Soul Silver (DS)

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

To follow on from the PokéPark Wii review, we have Pokémon Heart Gold and Soul Silver to review. These titles are a remake of Pokémon Gold and Silver, the original successors to Red and Blue released on Game Boy Colour back in 2000. This year Nintendo went back to this title, and gave it a significant upgrade for re-release this year.

The first thing that’s noticeable about the game is it comes in a pretty big box for a DS game. That’s because it comes packaged with a new toy called the Pokéwalker. It’s a pedometer with infrared connection and LCD screen that allows you to transfer Pokémon on it (the cartridge has a small infared sensor too) and take them for a “walk”. The longer you walk the more watts you build up, which unlocks new routes and increases odds of encountering rarer items and Pokémon. You can catch Pokémon in a simplified battle mode, play a game of chance to get items and share items with other friends Pokéwalker’s. This doesn’t affect the game itself too much (items and Pokémon are instantly added to your bag and Pokémon storage box) but it’s a nice motivation to get walking. A number of routes include Pokémon that are harder to find in-game and a few with special moves too.

In addition to the Pokéwalker, this remake also brings back the walking Pokémon feature last seen in Pokémon Yellow. Any Pokémon that is in the top slot of your team can walk around Johto with you and can interact with things (via turning and talking to it to see how it’s feeling about things). This paired with the Pokéwalker and little touches make the game feel a bit more immersive. Instead of your Pokemon just being in battles you can interact a little with them (this will be included in the upcoming Black & White through use of an online hub).

The game itself stays pretty true to the original release. The story remains the same as you progress, but everything’s been given a large lick of paint and graphical upgrades, Johto looks even better this time around. There are changes to the game as subtle as weather effects in certain sectors of the game and more major additions like the Pokéatholon, Where Pokémon take part in several Olympic-style mini-games. The slots have also been traded in for a new mini game called Voltorb Flip, a minesweeper like game were the longer you play and keep winning, the more tokens you get. The prizes on offer in both games are available by other means if you dislike the games, but they are fairly solid distractions. The contests from Diamond, Pearl and Platimum do not appear here, which may please some players (though the dress up element remains for taking pictures). The Suicune legendary storyline from Pokemon Crystal is integrated into both titles too. The only differences between the 2 versions is a slightly different storyline, different Pokédex entries and Pokémon.

The battle mode is the same as it’s always been, with its turn based limited animation fighting. New animations are added to Pokémon encounters and some general tweaks are added to the system, but otherwise its business as usual. There’s generally a good mix of wild Pokémon to encounter in your travels and the level progression is pretty good, though the game suddenly makes it harder to level near the end of the Johto league. Once the Kanto region (where Red,Blue and Yellow took place) is unlocked, it’s a bit too true to its original form with wild Pokémon at lower levels, the only way to level up your league winning Pokemon is to battle trainers. It can turn the game into a rather large grinding session. If you can persevere with the harder levelling, there’s still plenty to explore.

If you remember the original Gold and Silver and it was your favourite of the series, or you’re a big Pokémon fan, this title will help tide by the months till Black and White appears. This particular entry isn’t likely to win over those critical of the series, but some of the ideas tested here make for a slightly more personal experience and hint at some curious new approaches to the series with upcoming releases.

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Google gives away Android, but owns your identity

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Google’s Eric Schmidt announced that Google was activating 200,000 Aandroid phones per day, that’s an increase of over 100% from the same time last year and must be causing Apple a few nightmares. Though to put it in perspective, Nokia are still selling over 1.4m phones per day.

Google, Apple Microsoft and Nokia own the phone operating system (OS), but up until very recently Nokia (who did a deal with Yahoo Mobile) were the only company who didn’t own the back-end services to go with it.

In times of old Microsoft made a huge mistake by just treating the desktop OS (Windows) as a bit of software and though made a lot of money selling software, they didn’t really own the user. Google changed that by taking control of search and monetising their web experience (and then extending that with other web based applications).

On the mobile front Google came out with guns blazing, challenging the existing OS vendors, by giving away everything for free. This has led to the wide adoption of the OS by handset manufacturers and has caused waves in the industry so much so that Nokia open sourced Symbian. Google also toughted developers by making Android easy to program and by giving away Nexus One’s at pretty much every Google sponsored event (everyone likes a free phone).

Even though Google’s mission statement may include the phrase “do no evil”, they’re not giving away Android for free for any altruistic reasons. Google is a commercial company out to make money and they’ll do that however they can.

With Google search, they can track your search habits and deliver targetted advertising based on that profile, they can also tie that to your Google Email account and any other Google services you use. Android moves this to another dimension. As soon as you get the phone you have to ‘activate it’ which really means tieing it to your Google account (Android only works in a limited way if you don’t). Since everything that you use one the phone sits on top of the Android OS, now not only to Google know what your searching for, but they know every site you visit, every call you make, what apps your using and what they’re accessing as well as that it’s all nicely tied to your Google account.

Google are very cagey about what information they actually keep and how much they tie back to individuals (publically they say it’s all anonymised) but on Android that’s all linked back to a real ID and there’s potentially a huge amount of information they store which is of course useful to Google themselves, but who else do they make it available to? It’s very unlikely that it goes to any competitors, but what about the Government or security services?

Android isn’t the only way Google are trying to harness more information, they’ve already released the Chrome browser which which can send your desktop viewing habits back to Google and shortly they’ll be releasing the ChromeOS which is a complete desktop (or notebook) ‘cloud’ based operating with limited local storage so again Google own everything that you do.

Google are ‘activating’ 200,000 phones a day i.e. aorund 1m per week, so that’s a lot of people that they’re gathering a lot of information about.

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Lady Geek TV #7 – Can an App Really Make You Fit?

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

This week Lady Geek TV checks out the fitness apps with a difference.

We know how it starts. The huff and puff up your street while your Olympianesque neighbour sprints past with a cheery wave and an all-too-hearty, “Hello there!” Or maybe your favourite top is just that tiny bit too tight. Trainers laced up, gym membership at the ready, you vow this time it will be different – you will be fit. 200 meters later and you’re ready to collapse. How will you ever get fit?

This week, the Lady Geeks bring you fitness apps that WILL make a difference. The Lady Geeks show you how you can train your way to a 5K with the ingeniously named Couch to 5K for Android. Measure your progress and brag about your accomplishments with Sports Tracker for Nokia and prove those fitness skills with a crunch-off match thanks to Crunch Fu. You’ll be outpacing your smug lycra-clad neighbour in no time at all.

Get in touch before 6 pm on Monday 30th August and you can win the ultra cool Nokia X3. All you need to do is ‘like’ our facebook page at www.facebook.com/ladygeektv or follow us on twitter at twitter.com/ladygeektv.

The Lady Geeks look forward to hearing from you.

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