Just around the time that Google Nexus One rumors began to swirl, my old Blackberry died. Coincidence? I think not, especially after having seen the Nexus One when it was unveiled at a Google press conference in Mountain View, CA.

Nexus One was meant to be mine.

You may wonder exactly what it is about this little device, Google’s self-proclaimed superphone, that generates buzz even amongst uber geeks. Well, dear heart, I can sum it up in two words – cool factor. It’s a concept that until now has remained firmly gripped in Apple’s grubby little hands. It’s a concept that Microsoft keeps standing on its tippy toes trying to reach, barely grazing with its fingertips. It’s a concept that Google has captured and embodied in the Nexus One.

The size of a Swiss Army keychain knife, Nexus One measures 119mm tall, 59.8mm wide and 11.5mm deep. It weighs 130 grams with the battery, 100 grams without. There is a 5-megapixel camera and video recorder with 2x zoom and an LCD flash. Talk time is about 7 hours on 3G networks. It has WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS, a touch screen display and the ability to use other apps while talking.

I know what you’re thinking, adequate, but hardly an iPhone killer.

Insert cool factor:

• Light and Proximity Sensor – The Nexus One presumes that as the phone nears your face, you will be talking on it. It saves power by automatically dimming the display light.
• 3D user interface and Dynamic wallpaper – Your display background is a lovely fall scene, an oak tree covered with rain droplets. Suddenly the rain begins to fall more briskly. You see the splash as they enter a puddle. Leaves float gently in the breeze before falling to the ground.
• Voice control – Every field in any application that you can type in, can now be spoken. That’s right; Nexus One dictates your tweets or Facebook updates.
• Cooliris media gallery – Sure, the Nexus One has the graphic slider you’ve become accustomed to using. Thanks to Cooliris, it also has the ability to sort photos by time and geolocation. Flip intuitively through your photo albums and enjoy a visually stunning panoramic slideshow.
• Layered GPS – Type in your destination and receive turn-by-turn directions. Borrrrrrrrrrring! Add in a layer of gas stations and automatically nearby gas stations will be added to your map view. Add a satellite layer and trace your route via satellite as you drive. Add in a street view layer as you approach your direction and see what the building you’re looking for looks like.

Just before Google officially unveiled the Nexus One, Apple strategically announced that downloads from its app store had officially reached the 3 billion mark. Is the Nexus One an iPhone killer? Probably not. But at its press conference, Google announced that it was just the first in a long line of planned smart phone devices. The good buzz is already translating into sales. Barclays Capital Analyst Doug Anmuth estimates that Google might sell 5 or 6 million units in 2010. Factor in consumer’s dismal opinion of AT&T, the official U.S. iPhone service provider, and we may be looking at the Smartphone War of the Roses.

The King is dead. Long live the King.

Note: I didn’t attend the press conference in Mountain View, well…mostly because I wasn’t invited. So, special thanks to Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) who streamed the event live via Ustream.

Girls ‘n’ Gadgets will be back in march with a new look team and loads of gadget news!!!

In the mean time, do check out our recommended blogs in the links section.

Leila

Kelly

Hello everyone. Taking a cue from Madeline, I thought I should introduce myself prior to making my first post. Okay, technically this is my first post, but you know what I mean.

My name is Kelly Johnson. I live and work in San Diego, CA. Yes, tough life, but someone has to celebrate Christmas at 73 degrees Fahrenheit, why not me? I came across Girls ‘n’ Gadgets quite accidentally one evening, while browsing the web. You know the routine, one link leads to another and next thing I know I’m emailing Leila, telling her how much I enjoy her site and asking if she has any need for new bloggers, yada, yada, yada – and here I am.

My background is primarily in academia and the nonprofit arena. Right after college I worked as a newspaper reporter. A few years later I made the transition to public relations, a girl’s gotta eat after all.Seeking a new challenge, I took an admin job at the University of California, San Diego, working in the library information technology department. I was fortunate and lucky, to work with a group of brilliant and generous geeks who taught me most of what I know. The rest I learned in class, one of the benefits of working for a university.

Most recently I worked at the Wharton School in Pennsylvania, while my husband attended med school in Philadelphia, PA. These days I keep busy doing freelance web development, blogging, and engaging in geeky endeavors wherever I may find them. You can always reach me at kelly@girlsngadgets.com.

Heathrow has launched a new gifting website www.heathrowgiftlist.com to give those travelling through the airport this Christmas some festive inspiration or perhaps a present to add to their own wish list.  It’s a great place to find the newest and coolest gifts, share ideas and get top tips on the presents with the wow factor.  Choose from gifts including the latest Sony camera in pink to a Dell mini Netbook.

For the first time ever Heathrow is offering Reserve & Collect – a free and convenient service that allows passengers to reserve items from the gift list and then collect them at the store prior to boarding their flight.
 
Making it a Christmas worth celebrating, every list created on www.heathrowgiftlist.com will automatically be entered into a great prize draw offering four lucky users the chance to win their list up to the value of £2,500. 
 
 

Amethyst iPanda iPod speakers

To celebrate the launch of the site we’re giving away 2 Amethyst iPanda iPod Speaker sets!

 
To be in with a chance of winning, answer this simple question: Which category on the Heathrow Gift List will you find the Amethyst iPanda iPod Speakers?

A) For gadget lovers
B) For kids
C) For her

To enter please email your answer to: competitions@girlsngadgets.com along with your name, telephone number and Twitter name (if you have one).

Terms & conditions: Only one entry per person. Winners to be named on 30th December 2009. Prizes cannot be exchanged for cash. Competition open to UK residents only.

Founder Leila Gilley Accepting Awards

Girls ‘n’ Gadgets won the  Computer Weekly - Best Company/corporate: SMEs Award in a fantastic awards ceremony in London last night.

The awards were held at the uber trendy Shoreditch House and attracted top tech journalists/ bloggers such as Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC), Hermione Way (News Pepper and Techfluff ) and Kevin Anderson (Guardian).

Other winners included Michelle Flynn (Individual IT professional female), Steve Clayton (Individual IT professional male) and Elizabeth Harrin (Project management). The big winner of the night though was Graham Cluley with a whopping 3 awards (IT security, IT Twitter User of the Year and Best of the Best). Cap Gemini scooped two (Company/corporate: large enterprise and CIO/IT director).

List of Winners:

* CIO/IT director
Winner: Capgemini – CTO Blog
Runner up: CIO Blog – Peter Birley

* IT consultant and analyst
Winner: ITP Report – Alim Ozcan report
Runner up: The IT Skeptic

* Individual IT professional male
Winner: Steve Clayton – Geek in disguise
Runner up: TechHead

* Individual IT professional female
Winner: Flynny’s blog – EMC Consulting
Runner up: A girl’s guide to Project Management

* Company/corporate: large enterprise
Winner: Technology blog – Capgemini
Runner up: TechCrunch

* Company/corporate: SMEs
Winner: Girls’n’Gadgets
Runner up: The Symbian blog

* Project management (including methodologies, e.g. Agile)
Winner: A girl’s guide to Project management
Runner up: ZDNet – IT project failures – Michael Krigsman

* Sustainable and green IT
Winner: Greenbang
Runner up: Kate Craig-Wood – Kate’s Comment

* IT security
Winner: Graham Cluley’s Blog Sophos
Runner up: Countermeasures

* Open source in business
Winner: BrianTeeman.net
Runner up: ComputerWorld UK – Open Enterprise

* IT Twitter user of the year
Winner: @gcluley
Runners up: @stephenfry and @rickmans

The design of the Nokia Twist is sleek and sophisticated, yet simple. It is a small, square-shaped phone, smaller than the palm of my hand and you see only one button when closed. The first thing that catches your eye is the shiny hole on the corner of the phone. The hole lights up in different colors and it is used as the pivot point when twisting open and closed. The phone has rounded corners and has smooth edges, even when open. It comes with two different protector faceplates that you can change depending on what you’re in the mood for, black or purple. It actually resembles a compact when closed, and even has a mirror in the back when open. You’ll love this if you like to take pictures of yourself or if you don’t carry a mirror but need one.

The phone twists open to reveal a full Qwerty keyboard along with 7 shortcut keys: New Text Message, Music, Internet, Voice Command, Speakerphone On/Off, Camera, and Vibrate/Silent Mode. I am a huge fan of the Palm Pre’s rubbery keys and was hoping that was what I would find in this phone. If you enjoy having long nails and texting, fuhgettaboudit! My nails are not very long but sending messages on this phone was either at 5wpm or it looked like something from the Da Vinci Code.

Many people were expecting to find Nokia’s browser when tapping the Internet shortcut key but instead found Verizon’s Polaris browser. Verizon’s MobileWeb home page was the best part of my browsing experience with the Nokia Twist. It allowed me to type a number on the keypad instead of having to use the directional keys around the Menu button on the face of the phone.

Once I had to do more than view news, weather and sports, I began navigating using the directional keys and the keypad. I must say that this was a frustrating experience. The phone has 2 touch soft keys on each side of the directional pad. Whether you use your nail or finger tip to move the curser left, right, or up, you will most likely tap the soft key for stop, menu, or navigate. The CLR key is another touch key that is near the directional pad and if you hold the phone the wrong way, you will press it and go back to the previous page. If you are focused when browsing, you will most likely be able to manage without throwing the phone out the window but multi-taskers beware!

Most will tell you that the appearance of the Nokia Twist is unlike any other on the market but as far as its functionality, it is very similar to other flip-phones on the market. If you like the type of phone that allows full functionality without having to open it, this is not the phone for you. Without opening the phone you can silence and ignore calls, view contacts and text conversations, and navigate through the menu. If you like the type of phone that will turn heads and maybe score you some numbers, you have found your match!

I’d been desperate to get my hands on a Palm Pre since I saw the first demo videos that came out of CES in January. I’m an organisational failure, and the promise of being able to view my girlfriend’s hectic social calendar overlaid with my own, rather mundane, work calendar had me literally gnawing at my knuckles in anxious expectation.  I’ve never owned a smart phone unless you count the VTech ‘Tiny Touch’, because I think they’re universally terrible, but I have owned several Palm PDAs and I’ve always been impressed. 10 months on, and the wait is finally over: I’ve been the smugly-proud owner of a Pre for THREE WHOLE DAYS now – does it live up to the hype?

The Short Answer

Maybe. I’m very happy with it. If you’re the kind of person who wants the latest and greatest for the sake of owning it, go and buy one right now. Why are you even reading this? You know you’re going to no matter what I say. If you’re my girlfriend, you’ll complain that it’s weighty and the keyboard isn’t as nice as a Blackberry, if you’re my boss you’ll complain that the app store is empty and it’s a touch slow. In either case, screw you – I like it.

The Longer Answer

Setup, Power, and Assorted Tinkering

Out of the box, the pre comes with a micro-USB charger cable. At the time of US launch, Sprint claimed that the device required a Palm-specific charger and that other cables would not work but I’ve since heard from several people who’re happily using Blackberry chargers to power a Pre without causing fires or attracting the wrath of Satan – your mileage may vary.

I ponied up the extra £30 for a touchstone charger, but it hasn’t been worth it in all honesty. The touchstone uses inductive charging to power a battery so that your pre sits comfortably on your desk with no cables attached. It looks cool; the Pre fits into place with a satisfyingly magnetic clunk, and you can carry it off without detaching any wires; but it offers no real benefit unless you desperately need to answer your mobile in under 3 seconds.

Once the device is charged and turned on, there’s a well-considered tutorial complete with choirs of angels and videos of your productivity (represented as a shiny golden orb) swooping majestically over green fields. Having gone through the tutorial you’re well equipped to deal with the gesture system, and the phone leads you through a simple setup process for creating your Palm profile and importing your contacts from GMail, Exchange, and Facebook. It’s so simple I’m struggling to think of anything interesting to say about it, and that’s a GOOD THING.

Having used the phone for a few days, I’m disappointed with the battery life. I’ve seen other sites claim 2 days of use from a single charge, but they’re either lying or have neglected to turn it on. I’ve not gotten through a day without charging, and have managed to drain the battery completely with an evening’s tinkering. I’m told that the power consumption is on a par with the iPhone and the G1 but, frankly, that just means that *they’re* shit as well. My advice is to save your money on the touchstone, and invest in a second battery or – better yet – buy a third party battery and let me know if you get better results.

Overall fit & finish

I love the shape of the Pre. It fits neatly in the hand and feels about the same size as a Blackberry, if slightly thicker. It’s heavier too – you could deal someone a fatal blow with the thing if it came to it – but that adds to the quality feel rather than being unwieldy. It’s definitely more plasticky than either an iPhone or a Blackberry, but it’s solid and doesn’t feel cheap. The slide-action on the keyboard has a slight curve to it, like the G1, and this threw me initially but now feels very natural. I’d heard that the lip around the edge of the keyboard was sharp, and it is – you’re not going to lose any fingers on it,  but it feels a little unfinished, and it’s not a flaw that Apple would have shipped.

The keyboard itself is nothing to write home about. It’s better than I expected, given the coverage it’s received, but it’s definitely not in the Blackberry class. The keys feel slightly tacky and there’s not enough action on them to satisfy a QWERTY freak like myself. The biggest problem is the lip around the edge which makes hitting keys in the corners a cramped and unpleasant experience, but overall it’s perfectly adequate. The @ symbol and the period are given their own keys, which is handy, but the alt-key is awkwardly placed, especially for typing a slash which seems a little short-sighted given that it’s hard to type a URI without them.

The real star of the show, however, is the screen which is easily on a par with the iPhone. It’s bright and clear, and the multi-touch is beautifully responsive. I’ve turned the brightness down to the minimum setting to conserve power, and it’s still more than bright enough even in direct sunlight. It’s a genuine joy to behold, and I’m not a joyful person.

WebOS

The Pre’s hardware might make it a respectable also-ran, with neither the polish of an iPhone or the simple *rightness* of a Blackberry, but it’s the software that makes this phone interesting. WebOS is Palm’s last-ditch attempt to become relevant again, and they’ve pulled out all the stops.

WebOS is based on a card model, where each card houses an application. The touchscreen allows you to scroll through cards, expand them, minimise them, flick them off the screen to close an app, and generally faff around, dizzy with the power of it all. It’s a hoot, and I still open applications so I can flick them away again, just for the sheer, naked thrill of it. Really.

The Launcher bar gives quick access to applications

Zooming out to play with cards

Cards provide a windowed view for multitasking

Notifications for emails, tasks and so forth are represented by icons below the main screen where they’re neatly out of the way but visible. Tapping them causes them to expand, and you can dismiss them with the same flick-gesture that you use for closing an app. It’s an intuitive and engaging UI, and represents a serious challenge to that other phone by that other company.

The WebOS name comes from the idea that you can treat web pages as though they were apps: load up RememberTheMilk or Google Reader in a card, and it will stay open, running in the background so that the web is integrated with your “desktop” in a very fluid way. The browser is fast and makes a decent fist of rendering all the sites I’ve visited so far, but has a couple of glaring omissions.

Firstly, you can’t download images from a page – a fact so unbelievably retarded that it took me a good three hours of exploration to accept – but still less retarded than shipping without copy/paste.

Secondly, when I tried to open a PDF file from the web, I was told that there was no application that could open such a thing. Hey, Palm – how about you try the PDFView program that ships with the phone? Hopefully these niggles will be worked out with an update because they mar what is otherwise an excellent browsing experience.

Palm have borrowed the pinch and stretch gestures from the iPhone, and the Pre does an excellent job of scaling content. The browser renders content nippily, and adapts sites to fit in the screen. Flash support is expected some time this year, but Flash is an abomination unto the web in any case, so I don’t care.

Software updates happen in the background and over the air. I updated my phone the day after I got it, and noticed a drastic improvement in reception and call quality, so it’s definitely worth keeping up to date.

Synergy

Synergy is the lynchpin of WebOS and the reason that I bought a Pre instead of a Blackberry. The idea is simple – the Pre imports your data from your SIM card, your email accounts, and your social networks and aggregates them all as a single contact book, calendar, and IM client. You can “link” profiles, so that my boss’s phone number is associated with his Facebook page, his Google Talk account, and all his email addresses and the data is synced regularly keeping it up to date.

The phone will import *all* of your contacts, though – so if you’re a Facebook whore, you can expect to get a lot of useless entries on your Pre. The heuristic for automatically linking profiles is less than perfect, so expect to spend some quality time manually associating your contacts and cleaning out duff data. Once it’s all set up, though, it’s got some intriguing possibilities for bringing together the different data that rule your life.

The calendar does a great job here – I can finally view my girlfriend’s Google calendar alongside my Exchange calendar for work and my Facebook events, as a single, searchable view.  The device syncs happily with Exchange or Google calendar and it all just works. If I try to schedule a work event when I’m supposed to be at a romantic dinner for two, I’ll be notified immediately, even though the events are in different calendars on different systems.

Synergy allows you to switch from SMS to IM in the same conversation view

Multiple calendar sources show as a single merged view

Email inboxes are synced via Synergy. GMail and Exchange ship as standard with Yahoo support to come

Flick to messaging and within a single conversation view, you can switch between Google Talk, AIM, and SMS depending on the online status of a contact. MSN support is in beta stage and I imagine that Twitter isn’t too far behind.  Likewise emails are aggregated into a single view for all your accounts, and your Exchange folders and GMail labels are mirrored on the phone so that things stay categorised neatly on the move. All these apps use the same notifications system, so everything flows together in a very neat way.

Synergy is open to the development community, and LinkedIn have recently added synchronisation. It’s an absolute triumph, and one of the most interesting pieces of software I’ve seen in a long time.

The App Store

OK, it sucks. If you’re in the UK, then there’s a truly depressing dearth of apps, and most of what exists is in early beta. There is a flourishing dev community, though, and there’s a growing number of home-brew apps. If you take the plunge and get a Pre, your first stop should be PreCentral.Net where you can find all manner of patches and tweaks to pimp your phone. If you’re a wannabe hacker, there’s an SDK available for public download, which I’ll be playing with over the next few weeks. I’m hoping that the app community takes off in a big way because Synergy and WebOS deserve some development love.

The Moment You’ve all been waiting for

So is it all worth it? I’m ecstatic with my Pre and it’s barely left my hand since I got it. Having all my contacts, email, and IM in a single aggregated device is a revelation, and the phone itself is perfectly decent even if the keyboard disappoints hardcore Blackberry fans. This is clearly a first-generation device, but I’m crossing my fingers on Palm’s behalf, because this phone really does deserve to succeed.

I am very proud to announce that we have been nominated for an award for the Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards 2009. Check out Computer Weekly to find out more:-

Voting on Shortlist will begin on the 27th October.

*Fingers Crossed*

Madelline Garza - G'n'G US Correspondent

Howdy! I was recently given the very exciting opportunity to be Girls’n'Gadget’s Official US Correspondent so I thought I’d introduce myself!

My name is Madelline Garza and I live in Austin, Texas in the US of A. Austin’s motto is “Keep Austin Weird” so I might be writing about some of the “weird” stuff we get to see around here!

I have various interests but personally, I love my kids, very high heels, shopping, Halo, live music, movies, technology, languages, math, mocking stereotypes, and yummy dragon food (bad kids and pepperoni pizza are my favorite).

I grew up with my father who fixed and rebuilt computers on the side. Luckily, this came with several benefits including a keyboard and computer as my favorite toy at 11 years old. (I was typing at over 100wpm at 14!) Since I was daddy’s little girl, I became very interested in what he was doing with these “toys”.

In the 90’s I took part in a couple of social forums from “the valley” in south Texas and a few years ago, I began visiting different forums to help answer questions and give my advice on familiar subjects. I created an internal website for Apple’s International Carrier Support group and then before the launch of the iPhone 3G S and 3.0, I became a member of the Apple Employee Program to help moderate and answer questions in Apple’s forums.

In the past 10 years I have worked with networks, electronics and cell phones. I now work for Apple supporting the iPhones, Macs, and of course lovely PCs. Several months ago, a friend of mine met Swanny in London and then introduced me to Girls’n'Gadgets. I am proud to say that I am now a part of it and I can’t wait to deliver my take on tech for Girls’n'Gadgets!

Over and out

This year’s FOWA was my first, and what an event it turned out to be. There are so many exciting things in store for us and I was delighted to get an insight into the Future of Web Applications!

All of the presentations were interesting and beneficial and I struggled to whittle them down to a compiled a list of points from those that I found particularly interesting, but here goes.

The first talk to really get me thinking was ‘Get Niche, Rich and Go Mainstream’ with David Prager. I’d always personally brushed over Niche (or was it Nitch ) markets thinking that there wasn’t really a huge amount of revenue to be made there. Turns out I was very wrong, these are the untapped markets and it would seem the web is leaning towards this. It would make sense that the more relevant you can make your web app to someone the more likely they are to use you time and time again to get the best most suited product.

The next presentation to have my mind boggled was ‘Going Global’ with Cat Lee, the statistic that really sticks in my brain from Cat’s presentation is this: Facebook was translated into French in 24 hours, yes 24 hours! That’s incredible and how did they do it? They got their users to…genius. Why pay a third party or in-house employees to complete a requirement for you when you can ask your users whom are willing and eager to help. Facebook has created such a dedicated and loyal community that they want to work from them for free, this is proof of the power of crowd sourcing.

Both Kevin Rose’s and Gary V’s presentations left me with some points that seemed logical but one’s I’d never sat down and identified before. One of those being over featuring, by that I mean giving your users too many features. Instead do fewer features well continuing to improve on those that the users love. Remember to never think you know your users, you don’t. Ask them what they want – a feedback form is not good enough – get them to tell you what works for them and what doesn’t, that way they feel like the contributed and contribution gives you a sense of belonging. Something like uservoice.com seems ideal.

I have to mention Bruce Lawson’s talk on HTML5 – how very exciting! HTML5 really has something new to bring to the game, I can’t wait for all current browsers to support it (come on IE). Bruce’s Friday talk was SO good Ryan replaced his own panel debate on Saturday with another talk from Bruce, upon hearing what he had to say and demonstrate I’d definitely encourage people to experiment with it, although not on a live deployment just yet as it’s not fully supported.

I think my favourite presentation has to be one on Accessibility by Robin Christopherson – How to Increase the Accessibility of Your Web App. Firstly, what an amazing guy if you get the chance to see one of his presentations please go, it will be worth it. Before listening to this presentation I’d always kind of skipped over accessibility but I now realise the error of my ways! I did not realise that by making your site inaccessible you are cutting out a sizable slice of the market. If you’ve never put your site through a screen reader, do it (here’s a free download). I guarantee it will shed a new light on the importance of accessibility.

In my opinion FOWA was a great success (despite the issues with wifi) and an exciting look into the technologies we have awaiting us. I always find it so liberating to mingle and debate topics with such passionate, intelligent and driven people and FOWA was buzzing with just those types.