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The Mobile Computer Friday review

On 19 March 2010

Apple announce iPad battery replacement programme It sends you a replacement iPad for 99. Meet the Doritos Tablet It looks more like a giant crisp to us... youtube AgqnOqfehJE youtube Attention rich idiots! Diamond-encrusted iPad cover yours for just 19,999. Spiderpodium — the best worst iPhone stand ever Creepy, crawly, but still a clever iPhone

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Microsoft reveals early Windows Phone 7 ideas

On 19 March 2010 1 Comment

Love it or loathe it, there’s no denying that the Windows Phone 7 user interface is at least a radical attempt by Microsoft to forge a bold new path for its smartphone operating system. As you might expect though, the current ‘Metro’ UI wasn’t the only idea that Microsoft came up with and, perhaps in an attempt to eradicate those awful ‘Windows Mobile 7’ (as it

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How to upgrade your Windows 7 netbook screen for free, part 2

On 18 March 2010

We wrote about a free and easy way to increase the apparent screen resolution on a Windows 7 netbook just a few weeks ago, but now an even easier solution has come to light. All that’s required is to change a Registry key to enable support for a couple of resolutions higher than the native one of the netbook. Most 10.1” netbooks have 1024 x 600 screens, but there’s nothing to stop them

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Folding UK mains plug wins design award — on sale soon

On 18 March 2010

A design student’s reinvention the clunky UK three-pin mains plug was all over the internet last year, but the much-deserved attention lavished upon this clever folding design didn’t translate to a saleable product. That now looks set to change, after the design was named as the overall winner at the Brit Insurance Design Awards earlier this week. The design, by London-based art graduate Min-Kyu

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Windows Phone 7 can’t copy and paste

On 17 March 2010

Microsoft may be targeting the iPhone with its consumer-orientated, finger-friendly Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, but we’re not sure that mimicking everything that Apple once deemed important is the best way to go about it. Yesterday we wrote about how Windows Phone 7 won’t feature memory card support, the side-loading of applications and multi-tasking for anything but Microsoft’s own

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How to make your own OLED display in several not-so-easy steps

On 17 March 2010

Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology has long been waiting in the wings as a replacement for screens in everything from smartphones to HDTVs, but its development hasn’t happened as quickly as most people thought. Kodak produced a digital camera with an OLED screen back in 2003, but problems in scaling up this low-power, high vibrancy display technology mean that mainstream production

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Windows Phone 7 blocks multitasking and removable memory cards

On 16 March 2010

Microsoft has revealed some more information about the inner workings of Windows Phone 7, along with some minimum specifications required to run the operating system. First the bad news — there’s no third-party multi-tasking. Evidently taking a leaf from the iPhone design brief, Windows Phone 7 does support multi-tasking, but applications other than those from Microsoft (phone calls, music

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Auto Trader iPhone app looks up car prices from number plate photos

On 16 March 2010

Fully featured smartphone web browsers have already made looking up used car prices that much easier than with printed buying guides, but a new iPhone app from Auto Trader just made things simpler still. The Auto Trader app is a free download that can look up used car data based on its number plate. Details can be entered by hand or taken from a photo of the car in question, and the image recognition is

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HTC HD2 gets an OS upgrade — to Windows 95…

On 15 March 2010

There’s some consternation that the current crop of sexy Windows Mobile smartphones won’t be upgradeable to Windows Phone 7, with the luscious HTC HD2 being singled out as one particularly model that would benefit from a better operating system. Undeterred, the clever hackers over at the XDA Developers forum have taken it upon themselves to figure out a solution and the results of their collective

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Spiderpodium — the best / worst iPhone stand ever

On 15 March 2010

OK, so it clearly isn’t for everyone, but we think the Spiderpodium is a great idea. This versatile gadget holder clearly draws some inspiration from the Gorillapod, but the eight-legged design means that there’s no need for a dedicated tripod-mount — just use a couple of legs to wrap around the gadget and the remaining six to secure it somewhere. The Spiderpodium is made from a

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