Oi oi! It’s mealtime, so stop what you’re doing, unless it’s reading this, and tuck into our roundup of all the latest gadget gossip. It’s all ready and waiting for you here in the lunchtime lowdown – get it while it’s hot.
November, 2010
Lots of tablet manufacturers have neglected to put cameras in their devices, from the top end iPad to the budget Advent Vega, but does the camera on a tablet matter, or is it a function with no purpose in the tablet form factor? How much does it matter that a tablet has a camera? Are manufacturers missing a trick? Click and tell…
The Microsoft Kinect hacks are coming thick and fast. God bless you Adafruit and your Kinect hack bounty! Clever code wranglers have managed to create a Kinect Multitouch mashup and even create a Kinect Mac interface. We’re move than a little impressed and if you jump through to the other side and watch the videos, you will be too!
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It’s Friday, the day of flagrant messing about and our weekly celebration of procrastination: Sites We Like. Here’s the five sites that have made us happy this week, all collected together for your bookmarking pleasure. We’ve got a custom chocolate, sock subscriptions, travelling toys and more after the break…
After uproar against the survey that said Android users were actually Apple fanboys in the closet, hankering after an iPhone, we asked you what the best OS was. Apple’s iOS still trumped Android, but only by a tiny 2.5 per cent. Windows Phone 7, despite being a newcomer, came in a surprise third with 20.5 per cent of the vote, followed by Symbian, which was trailing behind with 3.5 per cent of the vote. WebOS came in fifth, despite us neglecting to put it on the list in the first place, as users entered their own answer, and all but a handful voted for webOS. RIM was at the bottom of the tree, with a measly 1.7 per cent of the vote. While the top of the list reflects the Android sales figures we hear so much about, it also says a lot about RIM, if webOS, with such a lower penetration, can pip it to the post.
Well, iOS 4.2 was predicted to be hitting iPads, iPhones and the iPod touch this week but alas that seems like it won’t come to pass now. Rumours rattling around the Apple echo chamber suggest that while the iOS 4.2 Gold Master is in the hands of developers and naughty folk willing to scour the web to snaffle it up, there’s a bug keeping the finished version from reaching us. Apparently it’s an iPad Wi-Fi issue (we’ve been here before – see iPad Wi-Fi problems). The new rumour is that iOS 4.2 will arrive early next week but other whispers say we could have a two week wait on our hands. We’ll keep you updated but this rumour is shifting faster than Roadrunner pursued by Wiley Coyote dressed in a black turtleneck.
Out TBC | £free | Apple (via Mac Stories)
Advertising mobile phone tariffs is tricky. It seems like ages since we were last wowed by either a great mobile offer, or the advertising telling us about it. Think back: T-Mobile’s still trotting out tiresome flashmobs, and Orange has had the same balloon animals for donkeys (and monkeys, and racoons) years. With that in mind, we weren’t expecting much from Vodafone Freebees, but we were wrong…
The Canon PowerShot G12 pushes the limits of what you can feasibly call a “compact” camera, but nobody was complaining at launch in September – after all, its predecessor, the Canon PowerShot G11 takes the best images this side of a DSLR. But with a price matching an entry level interchangeable lens camera, and only minor hardware upgrades on paper, is the Canon PowerShot G12 worth your cash? Let’s take a look at what the experts made of it here in our Canon PowerShot G12 review roundup.