Leila with son Alexander

Apologies for the radio silence over the past few weeks. I am pleased to announce that I gave birth to a baby boy on the 6th June called Alexander, so I have been coming to terms with the highs and lows of motherhood. And with motherhood has come a whole new world of gadgets, which as you can imagine, I’ve loved!

Being a Mum is hard work and Three have conducted some research to show exactly how much work we Mum’s do. According to their research, mums would earn £37,000 a year if they were paid for their hard work in the home (Now, that would be nice!) – around £13,000 higher than the UK average salary for a female in 2011. Three go on to say that mums work 23 hours above the average working week – longer hours than a junior doctor. I have a new found respect for what my Mum went though with two children and all the other Mum’s out there.

“Mobile internet on smartphones helps keep mums connected and gives them the freedom to be online for both work and play, wherever they are, and at a time most convenient to them. With Three’s all-you-can-eat data they can now do this without worrying about the cost.”

Without my iPhone and Blackberry, I know I’d be lost. My husband, for my birthday, also bought me an iPad which again is great to carry around and keep me connected for everything I need to be doing outside of the house.

Here’s their breakdown of how a Mum’s day is typically broken down:

Following on from my last post on the HTC HD7, I wanted to delve into a bit more detail on the competition I mentioned – and more specifically how you can help us at GnG win

We’ve been tasked with coming up with a Zune playlist for the Royal Wedding – not that it will be played on the day, well unless we have some royal readers that is? *Curtsies just in case*. Our playlist will be up against some of our fellow bloggers playlists and the list with the most votes wins…fairly simple mechanic but it doesn’t take much to get my competitive streak out!

You can vote for our playlist on Facebook here and fingers crossed for a GnG win

UPDATE: One lucky voter will win a Windows Phone music prize package, including:  a Windows Phone, a Jawbone speaker and a 12-month Zune® pass – as if you needed anymore reason to vote

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Our full Zune playlist can be found here and includes (in running order):

Oh dear, Harry’s got his Hitler costume on for the best man’s speech – oh wait, it’s getting worse now he is singing: Sex pistols, God Save the Queen

The first dance: Aladdin, A Whole New World

Charles and Camila take to the dance floor: Adam & The Ants, Prince Charming

Lion King, I Can’t Wait to be King

The Beatles, Her Majesty

Prince, Kiss

Billy Idol, White Wedding

Jungle Book, King of the Swingers

Queen, We Are the Champions

ABBA, Dancing Queen

Kate’s a bit tipsy and breaks out into spontaneous song! Bisquit, Two Princess

No wedding can happen without a bit of Take That…. Take That, Back for Good

Harry’s on the mike: Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Theme Tune

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A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Video Game BAFTA’s at the Hilton in Mayfair and met Jason Bradbury and his wife. Two very lovely people and yes… Jason is very geeky. Of course we  discussed gadgets, gaming and tech. It was so nice to meet someone who is just as enthusiatic about these things as I am!

I came across this Expansy’s Video today which made me laugh out loud and I just had to share with you all.

Nicely done Jason – Thanks for making my Thursday! Good work Expansys!

Do you want to be James Bond? Does your James Bond dream suit lack pockets? Or are you, like me, a little bit clumsy and prone to dropping your mobile? Alternatively, do you just find it too much effort to dig into your bag or man-like equivalent for your phone? There may be an answer.

SWAP steps in to fill this gap with the Rebel, a quad-band GSM mobile device on a watch. With a 1.4 inch colour touch screen and built in camera, the Rebel brings a computer to your wrist. The colourful water resistant rubber strap doubles as the charger and conceals a pin sized stylus, perfect for navigating the screen where your fingernail fails.

I discovered the built in camera on the side of the watch by accident when navigating the media menu. Let’s just say my partner was less-than-pleased with the resulting portrait, though it did make me feel a little bit more like James Bond. However, I was uneasy thinking of the potential consequences of failing to turn the device off, or even forgetting you’re wearing a phone watch straight out of the fevered imagination of M, as you happily make your way through US immigration. “This? It’s my SWAP Rebel phone watch! Why yes it has a camera and is a working mobile phone device. Why do you ask?”

However, this device is a workable solution as a back up phone, for novelty gadget lovers and anyone who wants to be a pretend spy.

Overall, the SWAP Rebel is the best ‘wrist computer’ on the market, and I could not help but think that this is exactly the kind of fun, colourful, robust gadget that could encourage young girls to engage with technology (as long as you remember to take it off them before going through Immigration). However, at £200, the price may put paid to this idea.

Peter Moleneux (Pic courtesy of BAFTA )

Last week, the Ballroom at Mayfair’s Hilton Hotel was the venue for the Video Game BAFTA’s sponserd by GAME. There was an atmosphere filled with excitement and anticipation. Dara O’Brien presented the evening and was joined by celebrities such as the legendary Robert Llewellyn, Jason Bradbury, the boys from Blue, Danny Wallace to name but a few.

My personal favourite of 2010, ‘Heavy Rain‘ walked away with 3 awards – Best Technical Innovation, Best Original Music and Best Story. Despite winning three awards of the evening, they were just pipped to the post for Best Game by ‘Mass Effect 2‘. Unsurprisingly, the Best Family Game went to ‘Kinect Sports‘. Kinect, was certainly one of the big winners in 2010 and was certainly a well deserved winner of this category.

The Fellowship Award went to the game designing legend, Peter Molyneux OBE. As one of the most highly regarded and best-known names in the industry, he co-founded Bullfrog Productions back in 1987. He’s the man behind titles such as the Fable series, Populous, Dungeon Keeper and Theme Park and thise games combined have sold around 15 million worldwide

Video Games Awards Winners in 2011

Action

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood
Gaëlec Simard, Ubisoft Entertainment/Ubisoft Montreal

Artistic Achievement

God of War III

Stig Asmussen, Ken Feldman, Cecil Kim, Sony Computer Entertainment/SCE Santa Monica Studio

Best Game

Mass Effect 2

Development Team, Electronic Arts/BioWare

Family

Kinect Sports

Development Team, Microsoft Games Studios/Rare

Gameplay

Super Mario Galaxy 2

Koichi Hayashida, Yoshiaki Koizumi, Takashi Tezuka - Nintendo/Nintendo

Handheld

Cut the Rope

Efim Voinov, Semyon Voinov - Chillingo/Zeptolab

Multiplayer

BAFTA maskNeed for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Development Team, Electronic Arts/Criterion Games

Original Music

Heavy Rain

David Cage, Guillaume de Fondaumiere, Scott Johnson - Sony Computer Entertainment/Quantic Dream & XDev Studio Europe

Social Network Game

My Empire

Development Team, Playfish/Playfish

Sports

F1 2010

Development Team, Codemasters/Codemasters Birmingham

Story

Heavy Rain

David Cage, Guillaume de Fondaumiere, Scott Johnson, Sony Computer Entertainment/Quantic Dream & XDev Studio Europe

Strategy

Civilization V

Jon Shafer, Dorian Newcomb, Brian Wade - 2K Games/Firaxis

Technical Innovation

Heavy Rain

David Cage, Guillaume de Fondaumiere, Scott Johnson - Sony Computer Entertainment/Quantic Dream & XDev Studio Europe

Use of Audio

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Patrick Bach, David Goldfarb - Electronic Arts/DICE

BAFTA Ones To Watch Award

Twang!

Jocce Marklund, Annette Nielsen, Linus Nordgren, Marcus Heder, Thomas Finlay (That Game Studio)

The GAME Award 2010

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Development Team, Activision Blizzard UK Ltd/Treyarch

Translation Fire is an fantastic idea implemented well. Mostly.

Unfortunately, whilst the core functionality of the app, which is to take text from other external sources on your iPhone and translate them accurately for you into any number of different languages works exceptionally well, the grammar in the help pop ups is enough to make me want to hunt the developer who wrote them down and give them an English lesson.

The Twitter interaction doesn’t work either. Possibly because it’s asking me for an email and password and not a Twitter username, indicating it’s not using oath. Strangely, the Gmail chat feature which allows you to translate chats on the fly using the app does work.

It needs a little work around the edges, then. But once you’ve accepted that unless something like the Japanese earthquake in Sendai happened yesterday, the chances of you wanting to tweet out your translations is slim, and focus on playing with the core of the app, some very impressive things start to happen.

The only language I know well enough to check on the accuracy of the translator is French. So I went to Le Monde, copied some text on the earthquake, and came back and pasted it into the app on the Clipboard tab. It automatically recognised the language the text was in (French) and switched back to the Compose tab and displayed a translation in English. It doesn’t have to be in English, it can be in some 50 other languages (though it’s worth noting some of the languages from countries on the edge of Europe, for example, don’t support audio translations).

So far, so impressive. But what’s really blown my mind is that the written translation produced is not some mangled tense broken mess as usually results when translating French to English. Instead, I’ve got beautiful, readable piece of text with impeccable grammar (thankfully the grammar of the help prompts does not translate across).

Just in case that’s not enough and you do happen to be in front of a waiter who is patiently waiting for your order in a language which bears some resemblance to his native tongue, those of us with the ability to destroy pronunciation are now saved from embarrassment with the ‘Listen’ button which proceeds to broadcast in audio the text rendered in the app. And it does it rather well. I’m not a fan of computer generated voices, in general, but even I’m begrudgingly admitting that these voices have intonations and accents appropriate for the language they’re reading.

Let me be perfectly honest. I am a design person. Things have to be aesthetically pleasing and grammatically satisfying for me to give up space in my iPhones memory. This app gets a resounding 9/10 for being quite epic despite satisfying neither of those things. It’s staying on my phone and being wielded repeatedly on weekend breaks in Europe.

Cinema apps have been around for a long old while on the iPhone so you’ll forgive me if I bring a healthy dose of scepticism to my first app review. I’ve simply seen it all before.

First impressions are not good – top 5 picks contain three animated 3D films, a comedy, and a film called I am number four whose Genre is…well who knows – it’s blank. Thankfully, further down is a Also showing section.

I want four things from an Odeon app. I want it to show me what’s on, show me trailers, allow me to book something I’m interested in and let me use my Odeon loyalty card. If that basic functionality is missing, it’s useless.

Showing me what’s on gets ticked two ways, allowing me to either look up by films being shown and then pushing me through to a cinema location selector (which for some odd reason is not GPS location enabled) where I can select the cinema I want to see it at, or through the Cinema tab which is GPS enabled. Quite why the functionality isn’t duplicated in both tabs I don’t know. A problem with the Cinema tab is that you can either enter a postcode or use the GPS – not so helpful if you’re not currently near the place you’d like to see the film at.

The trailers are slightly glitchy – I got an error the first time I ran one on our wireless, but it ran beautifully the second time. Behaviour out in the field will depend on 3G coverage, I suspect, as their nice resolution movies (and there’s no option to change the resolution of the movie depending on connection either).

The Rewards tab works well. Log in and you’re told how many points you’ve got, and what you can get with your points as well. What doesn’t work for me is the list of movies I’ve seen – I distinctly remember booking to see the latest Harry Potter and telling them my Odeon reward details – but it’s not listed in my ‘movies you’ve seen but not reviewed’ section. Which is a shame, because as a gentle nudge to review what you’ve seen, that’s quite nice.

Booking tickets is an interesting experience. You pick your film & your location, and then you’re presented with a screen with ‘Today’ and the showtimes to choose. What you do if you don’t want to book for today took me and my partner 5 minutes to work out, involving much tapping and swiping. We finally worked out swiping sideways was the answer but it wasn’t intuitive to us at all. We both kept tapping the ‘Today’ bit of the screen. Then I tried to pay. I can’t. I’ve tried three times now, and I simply cannot pay for two tickets to see True Grit this evening. I’d assume the problem was that I was on wifi if that wasn’t quite so ridiculous.

So we come to the crux of this review. The one thing this app has over any other generic film/cinema app is that it belongs to the Odeon and I can pay for tickets anywhere, absolutely anywhere, including in a car on the way to somewhere.

And it doesn’t work.

I’ve switched to HDSPA. I’ve hard closed the app. I’ve tried different cinemas and different films and I just can’t pay for my tickets.

File under: brilliant idea, poorly executed.

The ladies are back with their 3rd series of Lady Geek TV… Once again, Girls n Gadgets are proud to partner with them and bring you the entire 3rd series!

Ever fancied yourself as an international figure of mystery but worry you’ll give away your secret alter-ego? Or perhaps you fear your friends will discover your guilty crush and then shame you forever?

Well help is here because the Lady Geeks are back.

The first episode of series 3 shows our Lady Geeks turn super spy with Kaspersky and LastPass - apps that protect your smartphone and any personal information you hold on your phone.

Also check out our fabulous app of the week Podcatcher.

To be in with a chance to win a fantastic Nokia C6 watch carefully to spot our Lady Geek logo appear somewhere in the episode.

Don’t forget to join the Lady Geek community on Facebook and make technology more fun or follow us on Twitter.

Series 3, Episode 1

Ofcom as part of their remit under the Communications Act 2003 have to carry out research into consumer’s experiences of the way communications services are provided (such as broadband services) and then publish the results of the research.

Ofcom has so far published 3 broadband experience reports using data collected by research partner SamKnows Ltd. The latest report covers the period 1st Nov 2010 up to 15th Dec 2010.

Broadband speeds have increased on average by 5% since May 2010 to 6.2Mb/s (though the increase between Apr 2090 to May 2010 was 27%). This is mainly due to consumers moving to faster broadband services whose headline speed is above 10Mb/s.

Many services are still indicating “up to” speeds and very few customers actually get anywhere near those speeds, so withservices which advertise up to 20 or 24Mb/s only around 14% of customers were getting 12Mb/s while 58% of customers wer
e getting 6Mb/s or less.

The two exceptions to this we Virgin Media‘s cable services and BT’s Fibre to the cabinet services with Virgin’s 10Mb/s achieving an average of 9.6Mb/s, their 20Mb/s service achieving 18Mb/s and their 50Mb/s service averaged 45.6Mb/s.

BT’s “up to” 40Mb/s Infinity products managed a respectable 31.8Mb/s average (this provides fibre to the cabinet in the street and a VDSL2+ modem in the cabinet which should actually be able to provide over 100Mb/s).

BT’s Infinity service also provided the best upload speeds with an average of 7.8Mb/s with Virgin’s 50Mb/s service only providing an upload speed of 2.8Mb/s.

Peak Usage

The average speeds on some networks fell between 8 and 10pm when the network usage was greatest due to contention in the ISP networks however Sky’s service suffered the least slowdown of all the ISPs.

Advertising

Ofcom contributed to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) review on adverising with respect to broadband and they concluded that: -

• that if speed is used in advertising it must include a ‘Typical Speed Range’ (TSR), which should be based on average actual speeds that the 25th to 75th percentile of customers receive (i.e. the inter-quartile range).
• that this TSR must have at least equal prominence to any ‘up to’ claims made.
• that if an ‘up to’ speed is used it must represent the actual speed that a materially significant proportion of customers are capable of receiving.
• that any TSR or ‘up to’ speed used must be based on statistically robust analysis of connection data, with the data and methodology available for scrutiny.

The following figures are relavent: -

Current Packages Typical Speed Range
ADSL ‘up to’ 8Mb/s 2 – 5Mb/s
ADSL ‘up to’ 20/24Mb/s 3 – 9Mb/s
Cable ‘up to’ 10Mb/s 10Mb/s
Cable ‘up to’ 20Mb/s 18 – 19Mb/s
Cable ‘up to’ 50Mb/s 47 – 49Mb/s
FTTC ‘up to’ 40Mb/s 30 – 36Mb/s