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The biggest overhaul of Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE service, dubbed the New Xbox Experience (NXE), has finally gone live. Is it, like Microsoft marketing twerps tried to say recently, the biggest thing in home entertainment since the arrival of colour TV in 1954? Ah, no. First and foremost is the addition of avatars, giving gamers the chance to create little, cartoonish virtual identities, something like the Mii avatars on the Nintendo Wii but more animated, better looking and with more customisation options. No doubt, millions of LIVE gamers are currently dealing with the tough decisions ahead: goatee or not goatee? Some avid LIVE fans have had to wait a few hours for the prompt to update but then this is a popular upgrade so Microsoft’s Major Nelson is asking for some patience. “As you can imagine, it’s been an incredible day so far for the New Xbox Experience. With an update of this magnitude, reaching more than 14 million people around the globe, we are aware some of you may be experiencing a few hiccups along the way. The LIVE team is closely monitoring the LIVE service and Xbox.com and are aware of a few issues including what’s happening with Marketplace. The team is actively working on the issues, so thanks for bearing with us.” Jump now for Major Nelson’s Top 10 things to do with NXE.Top 10 NXE Tasks 1) Create (or Customize) your Avatar - You can spend as much (or as little) time as you want in the Avatar Editor to personalize your little guy/girl Bonus: When you are done with #1, be sure to take a Gamer Picture of your Avatar. In the Avatar editor, choose Gamer Picture. You can use the controls to move your avatar around, zoom in and out or even change the background color (press Y) 2) Explore the all new dashboard. (hint: use the trigger and bumpers to quickly scroll up and down or left and right) 3) PAR-TAY! Check out Xbox LIVE Parties and chat with up to seven of your friends. Go to the Friends channel…choose a friend who is online and press Y to get the party started. You can also hit the Xbox 360 Guide button > Party >Start a Party. Once you do that, send off invites to your party (since one does not make a very good party…does it?) 4) Themes. While any themes you work will NXE, check out some of the new themes via My Xbox and select your profile (second slot) and then change theme. Xbox 360, Spectrum, Day and Night are new themes that available as part of your NXE upgrade…check them out. 5) Marketplace on Xbox.com. This new feature lets you search, browse, and purchase games and videos while you are away from your console. You can also perform account management functions like changing your billing information, viewing your purchase history, and downloading items you already own. 6) Netflix - Xbox LIVE Gold Member and you have Netflix? If you are in the US you can stream thousands of videos (some in HD) directly from Netflix to your Xbox 360. Not a member? Sign up for a free trial at Xbox.com/netflix 7) Install to / Play from Hard Drive. With the game in the tray, return to your dashboard. (pressing the guide button then Y works as always) then go to My Xbox. From here press Y, which will bring up a new menu which will allow, among other things the ability to install a game to your hard drive. Hint: You can still use the Xbox 360 guide while installing a game to keep in touch with your friends or start a Party. Bonus: Before you do #7, be sure to set up what happens when you turn on your Xbox 360. My Xbox->System Settings>Console settings. Then choose Start up to to choose Disc, Xbox Dashboard or Windows Media Center. Once you are done there…check the option right below it: Autostart. This tell your Xbox 360 what to do when you insert a game. The choices are enable or disable. I have mine set to disable so I can easily use install to hard drive. Delete Zero Gamerscore games. You can remove any games from your games played list that you have earned no achievements or gamerscore. Press the Xbox 360- guide button, navigate left to the games section and choose Achievements. From here choose the game with zero gamerscore you want to remove and press X (Delete Game History.) 9) Press the Xbox 360 button on your controller to see the all new Guide. The team has added more functionality than the old guide, while making it more responsive. It’s a quick way to check your messages, see who is online or start a party. 10) Take a look at Community Games in the Games Marketplace. For the first time in the history of console gaming, thousands of games developed by the creative community will be available to the public. The update to NXE does some nice things like avatars, better communications with friends and Netflix downloads. That said, UK [and European] users still have no access to Netflix standard and HD movie and TV downloads - something that is proving to be one of the most popular NXE features for US gamers. C’mon guys, sort it out.-Martin Lynch

Original post by nafiz

The Nintendo Wii is two years old (in the US) today, and can look back at a wildly successful life so far as the format of choice for young and old. One of the biggest reasons for wiping the floor with the 360 and PS3 in terms of sales is undoubtedly to do with the cootchy-coo family-friendly titles that rope in less hardcore gamers, but it has been criticised for not appealing to more of a core demographic. Most recently, Wii Music and Animal Crossing have hardly set the world alight and Nintendo acknowledges that it’s probably about time to crank things up a bit. US Sales and Marketing VP Cammie Dunaway recently spoke to MTV and said that “next year you’re going to see the tide turn a little bit, in terms of people realizing that the Wii can have something of interest for everybody. I feel there are titles that should make [the core] stand up and pay attention next year.” She goes on to cite The Conduit and Mad World as two examples of ‘pushing the edge of the graphical capabilities of the Wii′, even though this is an area that’s never really going to be able to compete. Still a few more games with parental advisory warnings wouldn’t hurt, Resident Evil 4 was excellent. - Paul Lester [TechRadar] Nintendo Wii consoles

Original post by nafiz

Since we all love our gadgets and technology so much it’s a good idea to make sure they don’t run out of juice when we need them most. The latest in portable chargers is the PowerStar GO, which comes with a whole range of adaptors covering mobile phones, PDAs, iPods, portable games consoles, digital cameras and satnavs. It’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and holds enough power to fully charge a mobile phone five times, an iPod 15 times or a Nintendo DS up to three times. This is pretty impressive considering most rival devices are lucky to cover around half that, and if you only want to keep it for emergencies you can rest safe in the knowledge that it’ll retain its charge for up to a year. The PowerStar Go is available now for £50. Check out the official site below to make sure your particular make and model of gadget is covered. - Paul Lester [PowerStarGo] PowerStar battery charger

Original post by nafiz

Most modern HDTVs come with two or three HDMI ports but these won’t last long if you start piling up the games consoles, media streamers and set top boxes. To get around this you can buy an HDMI switcher, which is usually a fairly meaty device with a remote control that you need to use to tell it which port to activate. Not so with the IXOS Studio XHE228 though, which is a dual-port switcher that changes automatically. It supports HDMI version 1.3a, full 1080p resolutions and the connectors are gold plated to help prevent loss of quality. There’s also signal enhancer built in that helps prevent loss of quality at up to 15 meters. The XHE228 is pretty compact so we can imagine this being tucked neatly behind your A/V equipment quietly going about its business. It’s available now for £49.99, more details from the official site below. - Paul Lester [IXOS] IXOS HDMI home cinema

Original post by nafiz

As part of a series of core titles that include the wildly popular Wii Sports, Wii Play and Wii Fit, Nintendo was expecting big things from Wii Music when it hit the shelves on October 20th. Sales figures so far do nothing to back up these ambitions as in the first 11 days just under 81,000 units were sold, according to raw NPD data. ‘Flop′ would be too harsh a term to use at this early stage, but when you consider that Wii Fit sold just under 688,000 units in a similar period earlier this year it must be causing concern in the Nintendo camp.Reasons for the low sales figures are that unlike the other key titles there’s no innovative new hardware supplied with the game. The rhythm gaming market is also well covered by best-sellers like Rock Band and Guitar Hero and perhaps consumers are deciding that there’s just nothing special enough about Wii Music to justify the expense. Nintendo isn’t panicking and uses the example of games like Brain Age, which started slowly but went on to sell 2.5million copies, as a more comparable model than its traditional best-sellers. - Paul Lester [Gamespot] Wii Wii Music consoles

Original post by nafiz

You can tell people are getting ready to pig out in style this Christmas when the most searched-for product on the Internet by UK surfers is Nintendo’s Wii Fit. Hitwise said that during October, the Wii Fit led the Wii, the iPhone, Nokia N96, iPod and the PS3 as the priority Christmas items for UK online shoppers. Robin Goad, research director at Hitwise commented: “Wii Fit, Nintendo’s popular video game, is currently the most searched-for product by UK Internet shoppers in the run-up to Christmas. During October there were more UK Internet searches for Wii Fit than the Nintendo Wii, the most popular product last Christmas. After Wii Fit and the Wii console, the third most searched-for gadget is the Apple iPhone.” However, buying a console has dropped in importance this year compared to last as the focus now seems to have shifted to games. After our recent coverage of the Gears Of War 2 sales success and the frenzy yesterday to get World Of Warcraft: Wrath Of The Lich King, games look set kick the recession into touch. “The popularity of Nintendo’s Wii Fit, which accounted for one in six searches for a video game during October, has helped online searches for video games overtake those for consoles in the run-up to Christmas. Judging by the search data, it looks as if the current generation of consoles - the Wii, Playstation 3 and X-Box 360 - have started to mature.” Looking in more detail at the most searched for games during October, it is multi-platform video games that are most popular; almost one in two video game searches are for titles published across more than one console. Three of the top five most searched for video games in the UK during October were multi-platform: Far Cry 2, Call of Duty: World at War (released this week) and Saints Row 2.” Sadly, it looks like hundreds of thousands of you may be out of luck as Woolworths, John Lewis, Argos and Play.com are all reporting that they’ve now sold out of Wii Fit. Don’t despair too much though because Electronic Arts (EA) is cooking up its own ’shed-the-festive-flab′ Wii Fit rival called Sports Active - more on that later this morning.-Martin Lynch [Hitwise] games wii fit console

Original post by nafiz

A recent announcement from Silicon Mountain could be the shape of things to come in the home A/V market. Its upcoming Allio is an HDTV with a full blown PC built right in. Available in sizes from 32″ to 42″, the PC components are based around an Intel Core 2 Duo E4800 CPU with 4GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive and Windows Vista Home Premium. You’ll find a range of connectivity that includes copious amounts of USB ports for connecting peripherals and other gadgets, wired and wireless networking and an HDMI interface. The screen itself is capable of 1080p resolutions with a 2000:1 contrast ratio and you’ll also find a Blu-ray player built in to round things off. One thing that worries us about the official press release is that while the PC itself it pretty highly specced, there’s no mention of dedicated graphics. If it’s a token integrated effort that doesn’t offer enough oomph for the latest games then we don’t know why the rest of the specifications are so good, which may add an unnecessary premium to the price if all you’re doing is watching video and surfing the web. It hasn’t been announced for a UK release but it is very well priced, with the entry level 32″ system starting at $1,599.99 and the full-blown 42″ at $2,799. We wouldn’t be at all surprised if the UK ‘conversion’ of this price simple involves changing the dollar sign to a pound sign, but it’ll certainly be interesting to see if other companies in this market attempt to follow suit with similar devices. Do Gizmodo readers think TVs with built-in PCs are the future of home entertainment? - Paul Lester [Engadget] HDTV PC hybrid

Original post by nafiz

A recent announcement from Silicon Mountain could be the shape of things to come in the home A/V market. Its upcoming Allio is an HDTV with a full blown PC built right in. Available in sizes from 32″ to 42″, the PC components are based around an Intel Core 2 Duo E4800 CPU with 4GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive and Windows Vista Home Premium. You’ll find a range of connectivity that includes copious amounts of USB ports for connecting peripherals and other gadgets, wired and wireless networking and an HDMI interface. The screen itself is capable of 1080p resolutions with a 2000:1 contrast ratio and you’ll also find a Blu-ray player built in to round things off. One thing that worries us about the official press release is that while the PC itself is pretty highly specced, there’s no mention of dedicated graphics. If it’s a token integrated effort that doesn’t offer enough oomph for the latest games then we don’t know why the rest of the specifications are so good, which may add an unnecessary premium to the price if all you’re doing is watching video and surfing the web. It hasn’t been announced for a UK release but it is very well priced, with the entry level 32″ system starting at $1,599.99 and the full-blown 42″ at $2,799. We wouldn’t be at all surprised if the UK ‘conversion’ of this price simple involves changing the dollar sign to a pound sign, but it’ll certainly be interesting to see if other companies in this market attempt to follow suit with similar devices. Do Gizmodo readers think TVs with built-in PCs are the future of home entertainment? - Paul Lester [Engadget] HDTV PC hybrid

Original post by nafiz

Virgin Media has been banging on about its forthcoming 50Mbps broadband service since the end of last year and, while we still don’t know when it’s launching, the company has just released some shots of the modem you’ll be using to surf on the UK’s fastest broadband service. And isn’t it sweet? Looking like a cross between a PS3 and an InFocus projector, this is likely to be one of the very few modems that you won’t be hiding from visitors. The stylish curves are clad in the now unavoidable - yet still cool - glossy piano black finish. Underneath the gloss, the modem’s specs run like this: * EuroDOCSIS 3.0 / DOCSIS 3.0 Operation * EuroDOCSIS / DOCSIS 1.0 / 1.1 / 2.0 Compatible * Support for four channel bonding * Ethernet Interface (RJ-45) (10/100/1000 Mbps compatible) There seems to be just one Ethernet port on the back though [see photo below], which seems a little stingy but then I have no plans of sharing my 50Mbps connection with anyone. It’s been trialling in certain areas for the past year but a full rollout of the 50Mbps service is expected before the end of the year.-Martin Lynch [Trusted Reviews] online PC broadband internet

Original post by nafiz

During a summit for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, venture capitalist John Doerr spewed some funny logic regarding the iPhone:

But he also repeated his claim - made in March at the App store announcement - that the iPhone is more important than the PC. Even with the runaway success of games on Apple’s iconic device and thousands of other applications for the iPhone, that is still quite a claim.

I’m trying to think of a metaphorical explanation here (perhaps Doerr was trying to package the iPhone as the platform of the future), but I can’t help but gag and agree with the polite “quite a claim” conclusion of Mike Harvey.

Let’s face it: the iPhone is, for all intents and purposes, a phone. The PC—a generic gadget category that ironically covers the Mac—is a versatile multi-purpose piece of machinery that can do so much more. Even the most wild-eyed iPhone fans understand that even the “best” phone can’t do everything a PC can.

Granted, Doerr may have equated the importance of the iPhone with the apparently vast market potential of its application platform. But we are all aware of current hardware and ergonomic limitations. The phone still has a long way to go to offering an experience that matches what’s offered by the PC.

(image from kottke.org)

Tags: apple, importance, iPhone, John Doerr, pc

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Original post by Rico

We all know that the future of interaction with our PCs and consumer technology will involve gesture control but start-up Mgestyk Technologies claims to have cracked it now. What’s more, they claim their system uses nothing more than an ‘affordable 3D camera’ and its custom software to make playing games, opening applications and surfing the Web a mouse and keyboard-free experience. In the video you can see plenty of demonstrations of people doing all of the above but we’d be surprised if the reaction times of this system could in any way match those of a decent gaming mouse. That said, market watchers Gartner, have predicted [optimistically] that the mouse will be dead in just 3-to-5 years. However, the Mgestyk video is certainly fun to watch and the company promises - because it hasn’t launched anything yet - that the end result will cost the same as a high-end webcam. If you’re interested, you can sign up for the system here.-Martin Lynch [Source] PC software future

Original post by nafiz

We all know solid state disk (SSD) drives are faster, quieter, more reliable [and more expensive] than hard disk drives (HDDs) but SanDisk has just announced a new technology that will allow SSD drives to perform up to 100 times faster than they can now. Called ExtremeFFS (Flash File System), it will accelerate random write speeds by up to 100 times over existing systems. This new flash file management system operates on a page-based algorithm, which means there is no fixed coupling between physical and logical location. With ExtremeFFS, a written data sector is put where it’s most convenient and efficient. The result, says SanDisk, is a jump in random write performance by up to 100 times, as well as increased endurance for the SSD. A key element of ExtremeFFS is “usage-based content localisation”, where the flash management system ‘learns’ user patterns, putting the most commonly accessed data in the place quickest to retrieve it from. And will we have to wait years for this ‘breakthrough′? Thankfully, no. The tech will appear in SanDisk SSD drives from next year.-Martin Lynch [SanDisk] storage ssd technology

Original post by nafiz

A new concept in seating has been unveiled that takes robotic leg technology and applies it to your humble office chair. Oki Electric Industry, makers of the jumping Robot Leg have teamed up with furniture maker, Okamura to show off the Leopard, a seat that “fits the body, in which the back and seat of the chair follow the movement of the user’s body from seating and reclining through to standing.” Unlike the jumping Robot Leg though, this will not surprise innocent office workers by catapulting them out of the office window. Probably.Oki says that understanding the structure and features of the thigh to hip joint muscles was essential to creating the chair which is designed, believe it or not, to cradle you like a babe. When you sit into it, the seat “feels as if it’s wrapped around from the back, and fits perfectly to the back”. Also, when you stand, the seat raises a little too to help you move your lard ass upwards. “OKI’s robotic technology is based on studies of human movement and leverages new mechanisms for applications in the future technology of mechatronics,” said Yutaka Asai, Chief Technology Officer at OKI. “After thorough discussion, OKI focused on a situation where a child is held by the parent on the lap - that is, to develop a seat that can embrace the sitter through robotic technology based on an understanding of the human skeletal structure and muscular mechanisms. Adopting the very human concept of ‘embrace and wrap,’ OKI and Okamura decided to develop the concept jointly.” The Leopard chair is expected to come to market next year but, before jumping for joy, the companies say the chair is designed for “occupants weighing between 55 to 60kg”. Us fat Europeans may have to wait for a stronger version.-Martin Lynch robot work design

Original post by nafiz

The big Firefox news today is that the latest research stats from Net Applications show that Mozilla’s browser captured 20% of the market for the first time. For many though, this might be eclipsed by the news that pre-release versions of Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 now include the Private Browsing feature, or ‘porn mode’, as it has become affectionately known. Firefox programmer Ehsan Akhgar, explained:”Private Browsing aims to help you make sure that your Web browsing activities don’t leave any trace on your own computer. It is very important to note that Private Browsing is not a tool to keep you anonymous from Web sites or your ISP, or for example protect you from all kinds of spyware applications which use sophisticated techniques to intercept your online traffic. Private Browsing is only about making sure that Firefox doesn’t store any data which can be used to trace your online activities, no more, no less.” Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and the Beta 2 of IE 8 from Microsoft also sport a so-called ‘porn mode’. Firefox users will be able to download a more stable version of Firefox 3.1 soon.-Martin Lynch internet browser online

Original post by nafiz

‘Anytime, anyplace, anywhere, that’s Martini’. Oops, sorry, ‘…..that’s LaCie Internet Space’. OK, it doesn’t have the same ring as the old Martini ad jingle but it does pretty much offer you access to your files [music, video, data etc.] over the Net, even if it doesn’t get you bladdered. The minimalist-styled Internet Space is a network hard disk drive that promises to be really easy to use and will allow you access over the Net to your content, even when the PC is off. Promising idiot-proof set-up “in minutes”, the drive purports to be an all-singing-all-dancing remote storage location for use with PCs, UPnP or DLNA-certified players/adapters. It will also allow you to set up a personal Web portal so you can allow friends and family to access up to 1TB of your photos, music and videos. LaCie Internet Space will stream multimedia files [videos etc.] through your local network to compatible media players such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, as well as act as an iTunes music server. “The Internet Space is a user-friendly solution for customers wanting easily accessible network or remote storage for multiple computers or UPnP/DLNA media players,” said Christa Dabilly, LaCie Product Manager. “Whether you are looking for a quick and painless way to access your photo collection securely from your friend’s house or to share your last vacation photos with family, friends or colleagues, this device is a perfect NAS solution for remote use.” It comes with HipServTM DesktopMirror software, to back-up and restore files and there’s an additional USB 2.0 port for the really paranoid to hook up a spare HDD for extra safety. The 500GB and 1TB drives cost £134 and £180, respectively.-Martin Lynch [Lacie] PC storage gadget

Original post by nafiz