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A story in Marketing magazine leads me to the Asda site where it has launched a series of own brand electrical items.

These include an Asda DAB digital radio that sells, online at least, for the princely sum of £24.47.

A DAB radio for under twenty-five quid is fine by me, and thankfully, the set comes without any obvious signs of "Asda" branding.

But what I really love in the description. This radio comes with a "Gyro signal DAB module". Ooh. Impressive. I was looking for a radio with one of those!

Even more amusing is the fact that the tuner runs to "2 decimal places." So no longer do I need to listen to Absolute Radio on 105.8 FM when I can listen to it on 105.80 FM!

(NB. Yes, I know having this level of accuracy is useful on things like multi-band shortwave sets, but I don't see it as a feature to be promoted on a bog-standard radio).

It might have cost attendees (or their companies) cold hard cash to attend, but the audio from this year's Radio at the Edge is now available as a series of downloads as well as a summary podcast.

Entertainingly, the one session that isn't available is the Collings and Herrin podcast which they've deemed "uncompliant"!

Happily, this is available via their own podcast - it's number 37a.

I got invited along to the launch of a mobile phone the other day - the INQ1 (pronounced "Ink"). But just calling it a mobile phone is a bit harsh - it's more of a communications device than anything.

It comes from a new company who are looking to target people for who iPhones, Blackberrys, and Nseries Nokias are out of their price range (or desire). These are great, but expensive devices, and that means that the bulk of the market aren't interested in them. (I, of course, am interested in them, and currently quite like my Nokia N82).

What INQ has done is produce a device that serves a purpose and does it well. This, if you like, is the Facebook phone. Indeed we got a pre-recorded message from Mark Zuckerberg (a bit wooden, but then he's not an actor), telling us how much he loved it. Facebook is essentially built into the phone, along with Skype, eBay, MS Live Messenger et al. What is very clever, and has been done nowhere else, is the way it imports your contacts from these social networks into the phone.

So your Facebook contacts are now your phone contacts, along with photo profiles, and other data. The phone grabs similar data from your other networks and then lets you merge the various people together. You have to do this because in one system I might be "Adam Bowie", in another "A Bowie" and in another... well something very different.

The always on nature of the phone along with the built-in all-you-can-eat data seems good value, and it means that your Facebook updates ping the phone as they come through.

This is a basic phone, but at a reasonable PAYG price point or free on contract, it's going to appeal to a lot of people who don't need all the bells and whistles but just want internet connectivity wherever they go.

What is clear is that INQ and Three do seem to understand the market, and where there's a gap in it. I think that this could be pretty popular.

Disclaimer: I was invited to this launch presentation, and was given a memory stick, a poster and a t-shirt. So I think I'm being impartial!

A couple of weeks ago, I started playing with Geode - a Firefox plugin that allows your browser to use geolocation technology to determine whereabouts you are.

When you reach a Geode compatable site, a bar at the top of the browser asks you how much information you want to pass to the requesting site - Exact, Neighbourhood, City, Nothing.

When I tested it, I decided it could have my exact location. Now I was trying this using a WiFi laptop sitting at home. A Google map appeared and I was shocked to discover that it had my location within perhaps 10 metres.

My laptop has no GPS to position me, and it isn't connected to a cell-network for triangulation via cell towers. So how did it locate me?

Geode currently uses Skyhook who essentially maintain a database using GPS, cell tower locations and, importantly, a reference list of WiFi websites that are geocoded.

Mine is not the only wireless network in the flats where I live. I can see eight or ten other networks to one extent or another. And my neighbours are technical enough to have security enabled their networks (I discovered this when I was between routers and tried to find someone to leach from before my replacement router arrived). It's entirely possible that someone else's router is registered to Skyhook.

I assume that this is how my location was determined. I have a fixed IP Address and my ISP does know where I live, but it doesn't know whether or not I have WiFi, so I don't think that there's any data it could be selling on about me. In any case, if I beef up my WiFi security to the maximum, there's no way to discover my IP Address simply by sniffing my router.

But I would like to know for certain that one of my neighbours has registered their router, and my location is not somehow coming from my own router. While I'm sure that Skyhook's privacy is strict, I like to be in charge of my own data.

I was thinking about that when I was looking into another technology - satnavs. At the weekend, Something For The Weekend, the Tim Lovejoy vehicle, had their regular gadget review. A lady came on to demonstrate a couple of new pieces of technology. One was a TomTom satnav that included the usual mapping and traffic information, as well as things like local petrol prices.

Lovejoy asked a very fair question: how did the satnav know the prices? "From the satellites" came the answer. He tried again: he understood how the device knew where it was, but where was the petrol price information coming from. Satellites was again the answer. Eventually he gave up and moved on.

It was a fair question, because of couse, the only information coming from GPS satellites is location information - or more to the point, information about the satellites' positions to allow the device to triangulate its position on Earth. GPS satellites do not transmit UK petrol prices.

So how was it getting its info? Many devices have traffic information - usually provided by Trafficmaster. This is broadcast in the UK using RDS TMC technology on the FM network. Classic FM, the only national commercial FM operator carries the data and so as long as your satnav can receive Classic FM, it can pull that data down and use it to plot alternative routes etc. A separate system

But that's not how TomTom is getting either its traffic info, or its petrol price info. The petrol price info actually has to be downloaded via your home PC. I guess you just plug your device in regularly to keep it up to date. You're not storing your satnav in your glove compartment are you? TomTom buys the data from a third-party company.

But it's their HD Traffic I'm more interested in. Devices with this technology have SIM cards fitted, and we're told that the system uses 16.7m anonymous mobile phones. By capturing location detail from these phones, the system is able to monitor traffic flow - and you can be sure that these devices also contribute to that information. TomTom is, of course, keen to point out that this is an anonymous service, and you can't be tracked with it (there are mobile phone tracking services out there elsewhere mind you).

But given that the technology is fairly new, whose 16.7m phones is it using, and do the owners of those phones know?

The initial Dutch data utilised the Vodafone network, and it's that network that's also being used in the UK.

So if you're a Vodafone subscriber, did you know that Vodafone is monetising the data they collect about your location? To be clear, that's essentially data about which mast or masts your phone can see when it pings them. I'm sure that buried away in the terms and conditions you signed when you took our your contract, you agreed to let them use said data. But I feel uncomfortable about this.

It's come to my attention that over the last couple of years, although I still buy and listen to a lot of music, too much of it is through my iPod. Although I've got some half-decent Sennheiser earphones (i.e. not the ones that came with the device which are embarrassingly bad), that's not really the best way to listen.

On top of that, I actually have a quite decent stereo system at home, and when I do listen to CDs via that, the quality is astonishing.

So yesterday I went out and bought an Airport Express. OK - my interest had been piqued by a conversation with Geoff a couple of weeks ago. But I now realised that this relatively inexpensive device is exactly what I needed.

Setting it up was OK, although installation on Windows wasn't quite as simple and painless as Apple tried to claim it was. Indeed, on my Vista setup, I'd have been completely lost were it not for the fact that I've used WiFi for a few years now. Connecting to the Airport Express also meant losing my wireless router connection for a while until I could tie the two together into a single WiFi network.

Even that was a problem because the password I was using for my WEP-protected router wasn't 13 characters precisely. I took the opportunity to upgrade from WEP in the protection stakes, and this also meant some fiddling on XP machines with a patch that mysteriously hadn't been included on either of my machines (including my very recently flashed Asus Eee that now runs XP booting in under 30 seconds).

I got everything back on network with the exception of my PSP which refuses to work. No great loss as I rarely use it online these days.

As for the Airport Express? Well it works very well indeed. I think that Apple might include at least a cable in the box, but I'd bought one knowing that they hadn't.

And once installed, all the computers with iTunes on my network saw it, and gave me the option of streaming music to it rather than the tinny computer speakers.

Now I need to properly work out a single place for my iTunes library - preferably on a NAS drive. And finally I can start to comprehensively rip all my CDs in the same format. I have some as mp3s (and with an ongoing eMusic subscription, I'm likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future). Others are in Windows Media format, while anything ripped more recently is in AAC - at 256k. That's a particularly important detail, as I don't want my stereo finding the encoding quality wanting.

Any recommendations of NAS devices or enclosures with good power management (I don't want the drives continually spinning), would be more than welcome.

UBC today announced that it was closing down the phone service Cliq while it continues to look towards "connected" radios which will become available later in the year for its future business model.

Cliq worked by installing a JAVA app on your mobile that used the data network. The service monitored the output of 28 partner stations (including Heart and Galaxy networks), and allowed you to buy and download the music you heard for a price of £1.25.

Allowing your listeners to buy the songs that they've just heard is a perfectly sensible thing to be doing. So why has the service failed?

Well the takeup was low, and they had technical difficulties that they found hard to overcome. I know one person who simply couldn't get the service to work. I did have it running on my previous Windows Mobile device, but never actually used the service.

The fact that the music was encrypted with DRM, meaning that I had a limited number of devices to playback the music was the main reason, but the £1.25 price point is unattractive when iTunes is selling the same songs for 79p. That's a 58% premium! I believe that un-encrypted downloads are the only longterm solution that's going to be accepted by the public. We're already seeing that with iTunes beginning to unlock some of its inventory. Play.com is already up and running selling mp3s in the UK, with EMI the first of the big four record companies working with them. Amazon has announced it'll be selling downloads later this year, and it'll undoubtedly have done deals with all the majors, and Napster in the US has gone down the mp3 route for its sold tracks (subscriptions obviously work differently).

As a consumer I want to be able to listen to my music on my iPod, my mobile, my PSP, my Xbox, my PC and even my SatNav if I want!

But price is important as well. The music industry has undoubtedly taken a hit in recent years with albums seemingly as cheap now as they were when I was growing up. I read reports that Coldplay's new album, supposedly the saviour of EMI this year, is going to be sold for just £7 in Asda (and no doubt other supermarkets) tomorrow when it's released. But record companies lost control of the market when they left it to Apple to launch the iTunes store and didn't offer the service their consumers were crying out for themselves.

Linking your music sales offering with a radio station still makes sense. I'm concerned about developing hardware around a specific sales offering though. Requiring me to buy a new device in order that I can purchase your product is a brave move to make.

That said, wi-fi radios have yet to reach a significant level in the UK, and if they have DAB chips in them too, and are offered at a reasonable price point, then there's certainly a possibility. I believe that wi-fi is still a bit of a black art for many people. How many subscribers who have a BT Home Hub realise that they also have a wi-fi base station I wonder?

Anyway, I'll look forward to seeing the devices when they're released later in the year. But your product has to be priced in line with the rest of the industry, and when Amazon opens its mp3 store, we're all going to hear about it.

If you were a UK resident and rushed out and bought an Apple TV device after they were announced in autumn 2006, you'd have been sorely disappointed when you got home and plugged it in. Certainly you could listen to you iTunes library through your TV, as well as any video podcasts you subscribed to. But actual films or TV programmes were in short supply.

Over the past few months, that situation has improved, and you can buy episodes of Ashes to Ashes or Gavin and Stacey (ahead of a DVD release) availble to buy, but films have been in short supply, with some Pixar shorts being the main offerings.

ITV has been less forthcoming with its iTunes offering, with the feeling that they're holding back programming until after the launch of Kangaroo or SeeSaw or whatever the joint BBC Worldwide/ITV/Channel 4 venture ends up being called.

But back to films. Today, Apple's finally gotten around to making films available, and entertainingly, for the UK market, they're promoted on the iTunes store front page as being "films" even if they end up appearing in your iTunes library as "movies".

I'm not sure that I'm going to bother though. OK - so I don't have an Apple TV, iPhone, iPod Touch or even an iPod Classic, so aside from watching on my laptop screen, there's not a great deal of value me buying. Yet even if I did have one of the devices, the prices don't really do it for me.

First off there are rentals priced at £2.49 or £3.49 for catalogue and new releases respectively. So The Matrix will cost be £2.49 to rent. Yet the price of the DVD at Amazon to buy is only £2.98. Certainly there's a postage charge to come, but I've got Amazon Prime so it'd be here tomorrow for no extra cost!

Let's choose another film at random (Honestly - I am looking at random. I'm not just looking for examples to prove my point): School of Rock. Well, for some reason, that's not available to rent. But I can buy it for £6.99 as it's a catalogue title. At Amazon it's £4.97. Team America: World Police? Well it's on C4 this Saturday but again only available to buy at £6.99. £4.98 at Amazon.

A Mighty Heart? Well that doesn't count as a catalogue title because it's priced at £10.99. It's £6.98 on Amazon for the DVD.

I drew all these titles at random from the carousel on iTunes films homepage. I'm sure that there are films I can rent cheaper than I can buy them at Amazon, but then I could probably rent those at Blockbuster or Love Film or whatever too.

Maybe the situation's better for newer titles, since £10.99 compares well with new DVD's typically priced around fifteen quid on the high street in their week of release. National Treasure 2, brand new on DVD, is priced at £10.99 on iTunes. What about Amazon? 99p more expensive at £11.98. iTunes wins!

Of course you don't get the extras with iTunes, and the 1.4GB download might into your bandwidth capacity if you've got a cap. It's also more than likely to take you a while download. The size isn't suprising since the resolution is 640 by 480. Mind you PAL DVDs are 720 by 576, so iTune's resolution is inferior.

Then there's the sound - iTunes offers Dolby surround. Most DVDs offer Dolby Digital 5.1 sound - again vastly superior, especially if you have a home cinema set-up.

If buying movie downloads is to become as "successful" as it has been with music, then the price has to be more attractive. DVD prices are undoubtedly on a downward spiral (I use quotes because the growth in download revenues does not make up for the loss of CD revenues), with new released reaching the 3 for £20 price point ever faster, and even the movie companies realise that sales may well have peaked overall. But if they want to pick up some of the slack, then the pricing needs to be competitive. I don't think that it currently is. I could also go into a great rant about DRM, but I'll leave that for others. Needless to say, that alone is reason enough for me not to buy.

So in summary, iTunes movies are more restrictive than DVDs (you can't lend them to friends or sell them on eBay), are worse quality than DVDs, have fewer features than DVDs (no extras or commentaries), and as often than not more expensive than their DVD equivalents.

This won't matter to some people who'll be glad to find something that they can easily and legally put on their brand new 3G iPhones (coming soon we're promised), but overall I'm not convinced. Buy the DVD - you can use it in lots of hardware, and grab a copy of Handbrake. Drop the file onto your iPod Touch, PSP, Asus EEE, Xbox 360 or whatever, and watch it how you like.

There's been an awful lot of fuss in the last few weeks about "net neutrality" in the UK.

The supposed reason for this is the immediate success of the BBC iPlayer which is eating up bandwidth like it's going out of fashion. As the iPlayer arrives on the Nintendo Wii, the BBC announces that 42 million programmes have been downloaded in the iPlayer's first three months. And given that the top programme to make it into the top twenty fell right at the end of the period measured, it's fair to say that iPlayer is very much still in the ascendant.

The net result of this is that ISPs are beginning to call on the BBC to give them cash to offset the additional costs that the ISPs are facing. In particular, Tiscali and Virgin Media have been particularly outspoken.

Do they have a point? I don't think they have actually.

The problem is that many ISPs' business models are just completely broken. Tiscali's broadband offering, for example, starts at just £6.49. This includes "unlimited downloads" (although their fair usage policy explains that they traffic shape the bandwidth of P2P users during peak times).

The problem is that ISPs such as Tiscali generally rely on BT Wholesale for their ADSL connections. So, unless they actually fit kit in BT exchanges, they have to pay a metered rate to BT Wholesale for the bandwidth their customers use.

Yet Tiscali's agreesive pricing means that they feel they have to market their product on an unlimited basis.

It doesn't take a genius to realise that as people begin to want to download more data, the ISPs' profit margins are going to get squeezed. And it doesn't help that they're all in an ultra competitive marketplace where additional services including phone and television services are bundled together at a single price.

Here's a simple analogy. I decide to open an "eat as much as you like" buffet for which I'm going to charge diners £10 a plate. Overheads aside, some diners will eat less than a tenner's worth of food and I make money, while some greedy bastards will eat more and I'll lose money. I have to pitch the price right so that I get many more of the former than the latter.

But if everyone become's very greedy - we do live in an obese society - and I begin to see diminishing profits what do I do?

I can either up the cost of my buffet, or I can move to a more usual business plan and charge on a per meal basis. I particularly need to take into account how much my supplier charges me for food - and they almost certainly don't do that on an "unlimited" basis.

ISPs need to bite the bullet if they're not making enough cash. They need to either charge consumers more for unlimited data, or move to a per GB charge. They could, of course, drop access to high bandwidth sites like YouTube or the BBC. But I'm guessing that few consumers would take up such cheap internet (in)access.

I suspect that if my ISP moved to a per GB charge, that would lead to increased costs for me, although I should say that I've used the same ISP for coming on for 15 years now, and although I pay over the odds, I generally believe you get the service you pay for.

If a business plan is unsustainable, then change the business plan.

Otherwise you begin to sound like ITV moaning about how it can't afford its public service broadcasting obligations yet remaining quite happy to receive its spectrum free of charge (there was a very funny letter in The Guardian on Saturday from Five pointing out all its PSB efforts, and how it was quite happy to continue doing them: "don't charge us for our spectrum" was what I took from it).

So today, Ofcom has announced that it's planning a reorganisation of Freeview to allow one of the current six multiplexes to be made available for high definition services. New Freeview boxes will come onstream, and improved compression rates will to allow these new services to squeeze into the space. At the same time services currently sitting on the multiplex ear-marked for HD will move across to other multiplexes.

Ofcom's put together this lovely chart to explain the changes:

The space will become available by the BBC and NGW upgrading their multiplexes to use 64QAM instead of the current 16QAM. 64QAM allows for higher compression rates, although there have been questions asked (and these are mentioned in the Ofcom document) about the relative robustness of 64QAM compared to 16QAM. Ofcom believes that these issues have been resolved in later generations of Freeview devices.

Although overall, it's probably in the interests of consumers that some HD channels are available via Freeview (and thus don't require subscriptions to either Sky or Virgin cable), we must be concerned about any degradation in picture quality of the current channels.

A case in point was Tuesday night when ITV1 was showing Roma v Manchester United in the Champions' League. The picture quality was absolutely fine. But then switch over to Schalke v Barcelona on ITV4 and it's immediately clear that the picture is more "blocky." That's simply because ITV4 has greater compression than ITV1 (and as such, isn't directly related to whether the multiplex uses 16QAM or 64QAM - more how much bandwidth is given over to the channel). Both channels are on the same multiplex (Mux 2), which already uses 64QAM.

It's also worth noting that the HD services will be using the progressive rather than interlaced format ("p" rather than "i"). Sky HD, largely uses 1080i. There is ongoing debate into what's better, although Blu-Ray discs, I understand, tend to use 1080p.

I'm sure that we'll hear plenty more about all of this. Separately, it's going to be interesting to hear what Ofcom's verdict is on Sky's proposals to use the capacity is currently has on Mux C for Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three, and move to a subscription model using new compression techniques (as are being proposed for HD - they'll use DVB-T2 MPEG-4) to get more than three channels in.

On a broader scale, Ofcom hasn't explicitly talked about moving Freeview over to the MPEG-4 standard, although I can easily forsee this in the future, and the HD "back-door" route to get kit into homes is a good one.

Dennis Publishing has just started "the WORLD'S FIRST fully interactive digital magazine dedicated to bringing you the very latest and best in consumer technology." The second issue is out this week.

It's called iGIZMO, and it's dreadful.

Dennis has previously had success with a magazine called Monkey which is a similarly interactive title aimed at people who "read" Nuts and Zoo magazines. I'm not in their target market, but I can understand how that title might have succeeded - these magazines are things that you look at rather than read. As long as it has the right number of half-naked women, it's doing its "job."

As I say, I'm not a fan. But iGizmo has really failed because it has tried to mimic too closely the values of its predecessor. But this time, it's not just beautiful product shots that the reader wants (although they certainly do want those). The reader also needs to be informed about the products. And that means some kind of accompanying writing or perhaps video. Not only that, but the writing needs to be of a good standard, with an editorial voice that I can trust. If I'm expected to be spending four digits on some new high-end laptop or portable device, I really need to be sure that I'm spending it wisely. That's why I want a trusted voice. I'm not saying that it has to be a po-faced and dry voice, but I really do need to believe that I'm going to get valuable background information to make a decision.

You only have to look at the paper magazines that are in this marketplace already to realise this: Stuff and T3. They both have great photography, but they also have reviews that at least satisfy your needs. I wouldn't pretend that either magazine are the last word in flat screen TVs or digital radios, just as Five's The Gadget Show necessarily covers things relatively lightly to reach a larger audience. But in each of their cases, they do it well, and I'd be fairly happy making a buying decision on the back of one of their reviews.

Of course not everyone reads pages and pages of reviews and background information before deciding what new mp3 player they're going to buy. They might pick their device on the basis of a one-page summary in a non-tech magazine like FHM or Esquire. But then these aren't the people who are going to read something like iGizmo either. If I'm going to read a gadget magazine, then I'm going to want it to know about said gadgets in quite some detail.

Otherwise, I'm not really a fan of the page-turning mechanism iGizmo employs, and the double page ads are full of "content" that does nothing of interest. The computer games reviews are again better handled on specialist sites or magazines. Overall, it's just obvious that more time has spent considering the style and the look and feel of the "magazine" than has been spent commissioning pieces to actually read or videos to view. Very poor.

I'm much better off reading Wired and Engadget.

In the past I've had a bit of a go at websites rushing to produce iPhone friendly versions of themselves. This might be in some part because I'm not an Apple evangelist like so many tech people (I have an iPod, but that's it, and I think iTunes is a truly awful piece of bloatware). But I think it's mostly because producing websites for single platforms is surely a bad idea in the long term: if you produce an iPhone version of your site, then do you also produce a Windows Media, PSP or S60 version?

We're likely to get many more hardware devices of various sizes and shapes over the coming years. That's why we have standards, and browsers that can correctly render websites.

There is an argument for producing "lite" or mobile versions of websites. If you're unfortunate enough to be browsing via mobile on less than 3G (I am), then you need these versions, and frankly you need them with 3G too. And I see that the BBC has just launched a new version of its mobile site, although I'll stick to the PDA version since it's more useful for my handset.

But it's interesting to see what's happened following the creation of an iPhone friendly version of the iPlayer. Since Apple is for reasons currently unknown, refusing to implement Flash on its platform, the regular streaming version of the iPlayer won't work - and can't be tweaked to work.

That meant using a streaming H.264 format. But within hours of this new service launching, it quickly became apparent that you can pull down this stream relatively easily (well, OK - a bit of technical knowledge is required) thus ending up with highish quality un-DRMd mpeg-4 files of programmes. Why is it without DRM? Well that's pretty much the only way you can get your programmes onto an iPhone without selling it through the Apple Store, and that's a totally different proposition.

It's certainly true that there aren't "Download" here buttons, and you need some tools largely used by developers to pull the streams down. But it can be done, and it can be automated.

In reality, I wouldn't expect too many users to misuse the streams like this, although it does set a precedent. If you really want a dodgy download of Torchwood, you can already get it in a multiplicity of places. Divx/Xvid remains far more popular, with many DVD players now playing back this format natively.

But the questions regarding the choice of the iPhone as a platform remain. Many of the comments in the Beeb's internet blog on the subject are worth reading and valid.

Finally, it's worth noting that the BBC has explicitly explained that these services are for WiFi connections only, since a half hour programme results in a file well over 100MB in size - not something easily downloadable via EDGE (should you actually get that). GCap, who have started streaming a number of their radio services via the iPhone, similarly tells listeners that their service is for WiFi connections only. This isn't because you couldn't stream radio online via the iPhone - you could - but because O2, the UK's only iPhone service provider, actually disallows streaming. Lovely.

In some respects, this is a continuation of my last entry about Qtrax. While the final position of Qtrax has yet to be established, it's interesting to look at another high profile example that got plenty of coverage last year - Nokia's Comes With Music package.

As you may or may not recall, Nokia announced that a new range of Nokia phones would come with the ability to listen to free music from the Universal catalogue. Well, according to a piece from Bloomberg reported by Engadget, all is not quite what it might have first seemed.

Telecoms operators have something called ARPU which they're continually driving to maximise. It stands for Average Revenue Per User, and it refers to all those bolt-on services that you buy aside from airtime and texts. These days there's obviously data, any number of subscription text and video "content" and so on. Music downloads have been a recent addition, although issues based around getting your music from one device to another begin to rear their head and have probably stymied sales somewhat. But music remains popular, and advance access to concert tickets is another key area with all the major operators doing things in the area.

But when manufacturers like Nokia (or Apple) introduce their own services, they can sometimes undercut the telecoms operators, and an impasse can be reached.

So this report is interesting for two reasons. First, it explains that the "free" music is not really free, and that Universal is getting a cut of the handset cost and potentially part of the monthly contract in a similar way to Apple taking a proportion of its users' contracts. That cost might have to be built into the "music contract" that a user will have to sign. Secondly, they realise that without the assistance of the operators like Orange and Vodafone, they can't really get the scheme off the ground.

It still seems to me that it's unnecessarily confusing for an Orange subscriber with a Nokia "Comes With Music" phone has two different mechanisms for getting music - almost certainly incompatible with one another. But then PC users have a multiplicity of mechanisms for buying digital music from heavily DRMd iTunes music to mp3s from Emusic.

The market will have its say in the long term, but I would be very wary of anybody claiming that they're offering free music. We're at an experimental stage where new payment mechanisms need to be tried on for size. Jumping straight to free probably isn't sustainable in the long term.

Rory Cellan-Jones has a pretty spot-on analysis of a certain company's new product announcement yesterday. The argument put to him is that a new model of Ford Focus probably affects more people. I'm not sure that in hard numbers it does, but the point is well made.

Now if Bic launched a new version of the Biro...

(Via John Naughton)

This is pretty important. Back in 2006, Andrew Gowers published his review of intellectual property in the UK. It was a pretty intelligent look at the state of play in this country, although not everyone was happy with what he was recommending.

Anyway, a year has passed and now intellectual property minister Lord Triesman has published a public consultation on proposed changes to law.

The key change that's highlighted is making ripping a CD to your computer legal - as things stand, it's currently illegal in the UK.

Over a range of areas, the consultation is proposing a range of options and seeking views on which it should follow. This is actually a crucial chance to affect UK copyright law. So if like me, you care about this area of law, you need to carefully read through the consultation, and respond by 8 April 2008.

I'll return to this in more detail soon, but I expect that there'll be some significant internet debate in the meantime.

A recent entry on Boing Boing pointed to an article in Rolling Stone magazine which highlighted the fact that producers mix tracks so that they sound good when they're ripped to an mp3 player, at the same time, removing the subtleties that a wider dynamic range allows.

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow comments "...it seems to me that as a society, we're happy to sacrifice fidelity for ease of use, flexibility and low-cost (see, for example, the trend from landlines to cordless phones to mobile phones to Skype). Designing for that, as opposed to lamenting it -- is a damned good and realistic thing to do."

But has he read the full article? If he has, then he'll see that engineers and producers aren't happy with this trend. What we're getting are tracks with dynamic range compression to make them sound loud, thus removing some of the subtleties of the original sounds.

When you rip a CD to mp3 or similar lossy compression format, you're losing some of that range. We're often told that this compression simply loses audio beyond our hearing range, but it's really not as simple as that - an mp3 does not sound as good as a CD track when you play it through some decent speakers.

If all you're going to do is listen to your track through your iPod listening via the terrible ear buds that came with it, then you probably don't care. But give the crappy compressed version of the track to people who buy it from iTunes if they're happy with that. I still buy the majority of my music on CD because I want to hear the full range. I've got a rather nice stereo system with big floor standing speakers, and I can very much hear the difference.

Most FM radio stations also use lots of compression to make them sound "louder" and clearer than other stations on the dial. The music suffers.

You really can't just design for the lowest common denominator, otherwise we might as well design music to be optimised for those kids who listen to it from the speakers of their Nokia mobile phones at the back of the bus.

It really is strange that at a time when in the A/V world, we're all being persuaded to upgrade to HD TVs and high end 7.1 surround speaker systems to watch our Blu-Ray movies on, the CD world is going the other way.

But it's not just CDs - there are plenty of other areas where quality is losing out.

In the digital broadcast arena, poor quality seems to be accepted. Look at TV channels on Freeview and compare, say, BBC1 with ITV4. The latter, even with recently made programming looks terrible in comparison because it has a much lower bit-rate. ITV4 is on a multiplex that uses a more efficient compression technology, but it's still significantly worse. What that means is that channels look more "blocky" - something that's especially apparent as we all get larger and larger TVs (you can see a range of bitrates here).

A recent Deloitte & Touche report into the efficient use of spectrum by the BBC even recommended that the BBC should reduce its bitrate to squeeze more channels on. Viewers don't care they claimed. The BBC has promised to look into it.

In the run up to a full digital TV switchover in 2012, we're now looking at the resulting over-the-air pictures being worse than the previous analogue pictures. Yes, plenty of households had ghosting on their sets due to misaligned aerials, or coat-hangers stuffed into the back of their portable units, but that's not a reason to accept lower standards.

Satellite and digital cable are better but have their own issues. There's not a bandwidth shortage (at least for satellite), and those channels that are obviously lower in quality are so because they output in that format, or they're not prepared to spend enough on decent bandwidth on those platforms.

I am surprised that so few channels are broadcasting in widescreen - yes I'm looking at you UKTV and Virgin Media. Just about every TV sold these days is widescreen, yet even when a good proportion of their programming is now originated in 16:9, they persist in cropping it. There really is no excuse in 2008.

I'd love to say that my industry, radio, is better. But it's not is it? DAB can sound fine, but unless you invest in up to date codecs (ahem, Digital One), or don't overcompress, then it really doesn't beat a good analogue signal. Ask a Radio 3 listener or a DAB listener to the mono Radio 7.

The industry would argue that listeners don't care. They'll point to the fact that most DAB sets sold are "kitchen radios" which natively come with a single speaker. So there's no problem if they broadcast in 128k stereo (nearly every station), or even mono. Last Christmas, GCap launched theJazz and it's been pretty successful, in audience terms at least. Yet it's broadcast in mono. Now I'm no jazz aficionado, but surely this was a mistake. Jazz fans that I've met tend to be very particular about their listening environments, and high end kit is part of that. And maybe theJazz isn't really aimed at those hardcore fans (in the same way that Classic FM isn't really aimed at the die hards who prefer Radio 3), but it's telling that they even answer the mono question in their FAQs (and there is some space on Digital One these days...). Stereo was first broadcast in the UK in 1925 yet over 80 years later, we're not seeing greater dynamic range and more channels (5 or 7), but fewer.

If you look at the newspaper industry, they're continuing to upgrade presses to allow full colour on all their pages, and trying to ensure that ink doesn't rub off on your fingers. The technical quality is improving. Your local cinema probably sounds better than ever, and many screens are slowly becoming digital, meaning that we're seeing fewer scratchy old prints, instead getting pristine copies as we tend to see on recent well-mastered DVD releases.

But in so much of the broadcast arena, we're seeing declining quality. I'd argue that it was only recently that TV technology has improved to match a decent tube from ten or fifteen years ago, not displaying motion blur when showing sport, and handling dark pictures with lots of greys and blacks without "jaggies" appearing everywhere.

Quality really does matter. There are still many more stereo CD players in the world than mp3 players. At a time when record companies are facing a bleaker future than ever before, they might want to consider maintaining a quality product.

[UPDATE] Well what do you know? theJazz has just become stereo! Only 128kbps stereo - but that's still a vast improvement! Well done GCap/Digital One for finally getting that sorted.

And while we're talking about DAB - it's a shame today to hear that Oneword is effectively being closed down as Channel 4 pulls out of it. Oneword has always been a troubled station since there was never any real investment. Ironically they did have some decent programming, but it was just packaged badly. There'd be an unabridged adaptation of, say, Oliver Twist, that would run to forty episodes. Nobody is going to follow a series that long apart from one or two very real die-hards. Radio 4 rarely run a daily serial over more than a couple of weeks, and their hour long Classic Dramas tend to be between 1 and 4 weeks with very occasional "epics" that might run 13 weeks. But getting a producer to edit down the readings to more manageable lumps from the original unabridged audiobook versions was obviously expensive. And in any case, they filled time, and filling 24 hours a day with non-music programming is not a cheap thing to do.

There were some good shows like "Between The Lines," which felt almost unique in that it was book programme not presented by Mariella (Open Book on Radio 4, The Book Show on Sky Arts) Frostrop. But sadly it was lost amid the miasma of long form serials.

Of course this is also the problem that Channel 4 Radio is going to have. Widely touted as an alternative to Radio 4, it seems to me that it's bound to be closer to the non sports parts of Five Live. Not for nothing have they hired Five Live's Bob Shannon. They're unlikely to have more than a few serial book readings if they're sensible. Instead, the current affairs phone in is likely to prevail - less adversarial than Talksport perhaps.

With the recent launch of the iPhone in the UK, suddenly we're getting a spate of "we've optimised what we do for the iPhone" announcements.

For example, Sky News has an iPhone friendly home page, while the BBC has streamlined its podcasts page for iPhones.

A couple of things to say about this:

1) Isn't the point of the Safari browser on the iPhone that it can handle ordinary webpages without them having to be specially formated?

2) Why does the iPhone get special attention? Surely these sort of optimisations should be happening for all mobile clients?

OK. So both the BBC and Sky already have excellent mobile versions of their websites, and I know that producing these pages is probably just a little tinkering with some previously created templates via their content management systems.

But we're entering dangerous territory if we're expecting website creators to launch new versions of websites for every new devices that hits the market. I quite fancy one of those Asus Eee PCs which have very small screens. They're selling bucketloads, so can everyone please make their websites look nice for that device - making full use of the screen's fairly limited real estate? The BBC blog notes that other devices are coming soon. So which device has more in the market in the UK currently? The iPhone or the PSP? And which one has gets the new podcast page. Hmm. It's not like anyone's going to be downloading podcasts on the iPhone via EDGE anyway...

And no, this website is not optimised for the iPhone or any mobile device. There's a very slow redesign happening, and a mobile version may or may not be part of it depending on how hard it is to read. Let's face it, you're reading this text via your favourite RSS reader anyway!

It's great to hear that the team over at Bletchley Park has finished its rebuild of Colossus. This was one of the first programmable computers ever built, and it was used for code breaking towards the end of WWII.

The photo above was taken a couple of years ago now when I visited Bletchley Park. The whole project has actually taken 14 years to complete!

I note that Virgin Media customers will be able to get "dynamic interactive content" from BBC Radio services later this month. Basically this gives you lots of "now playing" type information when you're watching a BBC Radio channel.

As the press release explains, this has been available on Freeview for sometime. And the release also coyly mentions that "BBCi now visualises radio listening on most major digital TV platforms."

In other words: you can get it on Freeview, and you can get it on cable. But you can't get it on Sky.

If there's one glaring in hole in Sky's otherwise very good system, it's the lack of flexibility in their radio section, without even basic Now & Next functionality. You can't see anything beyond a description of the current programme on the EPG - certainly not a list of programmes over the coming days. And you can't set your Sky+ to record a radio programme without prior knowledge of programme times, and an understanding of how to manually record things.

Let's hope that releases like this get Sky to pull their finger out and do something. It really can't be that hard!

I'm torn. I admit it.

On the one hand, it annoys the hell out of me that one company's product launches gets so much coverage. But on the other hand, at 6pm last night I was sitting at my desk hitting refresh on Engadget's excellent live blogging of Apple's latest launch event.

So much was hoped for. Not quite as much was delivered.

There's a new Nano which, while smaller and with video, I'm not convinced is actually in a good form factor being just about square. Perhaps if I play with one in an Apple store I'll think differently, but given that you can watch video on it, how are you supposed to comfortably hold it? It's also disappointing that the memory size hasn't increased, with just 4GB and 8GB models available. My current Nano is 8GB already (yes these new ones are cheaper).

I'll leave Americans to stew about the price cut in the iPhone just a couple of months after launch. I think that's an implicit acknowledgment that the product's been overpriced to date. When we hear about European, and particularly British carriers, the pricing will be really interesting. Whoever gets it, will surely give it away pretty cheaply or even free for new customers who switch. Charging upwards of £300 is not something the mass market is prepared to do here.

But I am a bit disappointed in what we must now call the iPod Touch. Certainly it looks cool, and having WiFi and a big screen is great. But it only comes in 8GB or 16GB sizes because the memory's flash. In the UK I can pay £269 for a 16GB cool looking video player? Or I can pay slightly less for a 160GB iPod Classic. It's simply not value for money. You're surely better off getting one of the new slim PSPs and a decent sized memory card. Given that video is a large part of it's raison d'etre, you're not going to get many episodes of TV shows or films on it before you run out of memory. My Nano just has music and podcasts and is regularly jam-packed at 8GB.

The 160GB iPod Classic does look interesting since it has a hard disk that might actually take my entire CD collection.

Oh, and there's no sign of the suggested digital radio (not even an included FM radio which is pathetic really) which doesn't surprise me, with no formal standard adopted.

Nor is there any sign of any BBC programming on iTunes. I think that was a wild rumour based around the fact that in the UK, Apple used BBC Television Centre to beam back Steve Jobs' presentation.

And I don't understand why WiFi isn't built into all the new iPods. The Zune managed it.

Apple did announce some kind of buy it now service in Starbucks using the iPod Touch, but I'd have thought they'd have the ability to do much more.

How about this? Your WiFi iPod lets you stream radio via Apple's iTunes service. Apples uses a music matching service much like how Shazam works with mobile phones, that compares the audio you're hearing with all the tracks they have in their iTunes database. They can then easily identify the track you're hearing from your favourite radio station, and you can buy it there and then.

I mentioned the NBC/Apple spat about video pricing the other day, and I still stand by the idea that pricing should be variable as it is in nearly every other product or service that you can buy. But I'm not too impressed with NBC's solution which is to go with Amazon's (US only) Unbox service, since that just serves DRM'd Windows Media files. No use for an iPod or PSP - surely the two most popular digital video playback devices. I know NBC seems perversely scared about DRM-free content, but they do need to remember that they're broadcasting this stuff free-to-air in HD. Just make it easy for consumers to buy, and buy it they surely will. Oh, and price it cheaper than DVDs - just like downloads tend to (but not always) cost less than CDs.

Anyway, the device I'm most interested that was announced yesterday is the Sony Alpha 700. Quite pricey though...

I can't believe the number of times that Dixons Stores Group can put out effectively the same press release, and still get the media lapping it up.

Today, it's the shock-horror news that they're no longer going to sell blank cassettes. Are we going to get this same story every time DSG makes a decision about what products they're going to stock?

We've already had VCRs, Analogue Radios (not remotely true as they still sell worldband radios as well as AM/FM radios built into mini-systems), CRT televisions (even though in many cases, they're still better than their flatscreen equivalents), 35mm film cameras (nobody's making them much, so it's moot) and even incandescent bulbs (seriously - who goes to Currys to buy bulbs?). I expect I missed the LaserDisc, Disc Camera and Eight-track Cartridge announcements.

Isn't reporting these releases the equivalent to building a feature from a press-released "poll?" Mabe Argos is missing a trick by not listing junked items between its catalogues.

It's just lazy journalism.

This week's Independent on Sunday had a massive banner headline - "Wi-Fi: Children at risk from 'electronic smog' "

A further story was entitled "Danger on the airwaves: Is the Wi-Fi revolution a health time bomb?"

The reports go on to report that WiFi is everywhere these days including many homes, towns and schools. So is it dangerous? What's the basis of these reports?

"Virtually no studies have been carried out into Wi-Fi's effects on pupils," says the Independent on Sunday's report. So what's the basis of a front page scaremongering story then?

WiFi broadcasts around 2.4 GHz (UHF - Ultra High Frequency) which is somewhere around where microwave ovens work as well as TV is broadcast, along with mobile phones, bluetooth, GPS, some two-way radios and many other things. WiFi is limited to around 100m maximum, whereas mobile phones broadcast for upwards of 2km. I trust that no parent is ever again let their child use a mobile phone, and nor are they going to have any switched on themselves in the home (or any other time they're with their children).

So, as Rob Beschizza writes over at Wired, either all of these things are dangerous, or none of them.

Undoubtedly, examining whether there are health risks based around all these technologies is a worthwhile venture, but I'd really hope that The Independent on Sunday is above these feeble sensationalist headlines.

There's an excellent piece penned by Bill Thompson over at the BBC dismantling this kind of scaremongering.

Google recently introduced an application for Windows Mobile phones that lets you view Google Maps neatly and quickly on your mobile phone. This is a great little app which is wonderfully useful. No longer will I have to remember to printout a paper map before I set off somewhere new.

On GPRS, the maps load quickly, and they're a lot better than the feeble ones I can get via Orange. I once tried relying on them in the depths of Suffolk and walked a good half an hour out of my way as a result. Then I lost reception... but that's going to be a factor here too!

Visit google.com/gmm on your mobile device to download the 600k application.

Just as well that I'm on an eat-as-much-as-you-want data plan! With the Gmail application, I'm getting few quite a few MB a month on my mobile these days.

A short aside from the previous piece on Apple. In the presentation, Jobs pointed out that Apple had got more than 200 patents on various parts of the iPhone. And a recent Audi A6 TV ad talks about how it has taken out more patents than NASA has ever taken out for its new car (9,621 filed).

Am I the only person who thinks that extreme numbers of patents are actually a really bad thing? I mean are there 10,000 different components actually in a new car that can be patented?

OK. I know every website, newspaper and blog in the world has already commented on Apple's announcements yesterday, but I just had to get a few things off my chest.

First of all, I want to know why everyone practically has orgasms about new Apple launches. I mean CES has been taking place in Las Vegas this week, and everyone and their mum has been launching some new hardware device. But this gets the cover of The Times, a full page in The Guardian and countless TV and web reports.

It seems that in an increasingly secular world, the new Messiah for some is Steve Jobs (when really they should be worshipping Jonathan Ive CBE). Maybe he should trade his black T-shirt for long flowing white robes.

From a rational point of view, it seems that a hi-tech company has announced two new products: a mobile phone, and a television set-top box. But the phone looks really cool and comes from the people who brought you the iPod. And the set-top box links up with your home network.

Lets look at the phone first, since that's what everyone else is doing. It's cool. It's desirable. It's got some very neat features. It won't be out in Europe until at least October. And then it may not be on your network. Cue fights between UK networks to get dibs on it, since not inconsiderable numbers of Apple devotees would undoubtedly switch networks to get one.

So what's wrong with that? Well, a few things. I've got a Windows Smartphone. It's one with a stylus, but without a keyboard, and it's, well, OK...ish. It does some stuff brilliantly, and that's why I have it. It syncs perfectly with both my work and home computers which means when I recently lost my phone, I could get up and running with all my contacts and calendar information restored immediately. It too has a big screen, and a largish surface area.

Whilst my phone is undoubtedly thicker that the iPhone, it does share one characteristic, and that's that most of the top surface area is a screen. And screens need protecting and get dirty.

If you buy an iPod - particuarly something like a Nano - you almost certainly need to protect it with some type of case or "skin". This is all the more so with a device that is effectively glass on one side. You're not going to be able to put it with your keys in your pocket or wherever. Suddenly not so slim.

If I hold my screen up to the light, it's covered in fingerprints and marks. I'm always polishing the screen with my shirt tail. This is a phone that I'm supposed to use a stylus with rather than my fingers don't forget. The iPhone is going to get mucky.

I suppose that I'm disappointed that for a phone that's the size of a regular iPod, the disk size is only the same spec as a larger capacity Nano. Regular iPod users aren't going to be able to fully replace their devices with this phone. And while a widescreen is lovely (and something iPod should already have had), that memory's sure going to get eaten up if you download many films. Speaking of which, has anyone yet seen any of these on the UK iTunes store? More of this is a minute.

Nokia and Sony Ericsson's Walkman latest music phones already come with 4GB. They're bound to be 8GB too by the end of the year.

Finally, the iPhone is big. Really big. But it'll sell plenty.

Onto Apple TV. From a broader point of view, this is a device that I want to buy. It could be the link between my PC and my TV that I've been looking for. I'm still hoping to find a way to get TV back to my, that doesn't involve unscrewing my PVR's front cover and removing the hard drive, but at the moment, I'm making full use of a Divx/Xvid enabled DVD player to watch downloaded television.

Apple TV links iTunes on my home network with my TV to let me see video, as well as music and photos played back on the set. Sadly, it's next to useless for me for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it's broadly HD-only. In fact the PAL version only really requires a widescreen set, but with only HDMI and component outs, it's not enough for those of us clinging onto perfectly good TVs that don't have better connectivity; a scart socket for example. HDTV doesn't have the penetration here that it does in the States. I'd have specced the device differently for the UK, but that's not something Apple gets into as far as I can tell.

Worse than that is the media you play through it. Looking at the specs, it's clearly aimed at either video content you've authored yourself - perhaps in Final Cut Pro or Premiere - or more likely, downloaded via iTunes. For us in the UK, that's not really enough. iTunes has minimal video content available, with either a selection of music videos or a handful of Pixar shorts to watch. I'm not sure how video that was encoded to be played back on an iPod is going to look on a 40" HD plasma anyway.

So I'm still looking for some kind of device to play back my music, movies and photos on my TV via my network. Actually, I suspect that it already exists, and that I should have picked up one of those Xboxes that were on sale for £49 at Argos the other week.

[UPDATE]

A fascinating piece on the Communities Dominate Brands blog, explaining the real complications Apple face in becoming a major player in mobile phones. In particular, the diverse European market where there are upwards of 100 different operators that need to be dealt with, each of whom has their own requirements. The Orange logo and Vodafone Live buttons are both mentioned. Well worth a read, and be sure to read the comments and the author's responses to those comments. Yes, I know it runs to something like 12,000 words as it stands - perhaps a fifth of a 240 page novel. But it's worth it!

Please do let me know if I'm doing some obviously wrong, but I've got a bit of an issue with iTunes that I can't solve without using a workaround.

I have iTunes on a work computer (ahem - don't tell our IT department) and also on a home PC. I like to listen to podcasts. I understand that iTunes will only sync to podcasts on one PC, so I've chosen my home machine. But sometimes I like to download an up to date podcast to listen to on the way home.

I can't sync to my work machine, but I can drag and drop individual podcasts from iTunes to my iPod. Except that the tracks then don't show up under the iPod's Music or Podcasts (or Audiobooks) menus in iTunes. They've vanished - even though I saw some transfer activity as I drag and dropped.

Not only that, but you can only find these orphaned "songs" under the Songs menu on the iPod itself. In other words - they're there on the device, but you can't see them via iTunes.

That's a bit of a problem, because in Apple's infinite wisdom, it seems to have neglected to include a "Delete" function for songs. I quite like to delete podcasts after I've heard them to keep things nice and tidy, and I'm not always near a PC to do this.

But now I have audio on my iPod that I can't see through iTunes and can't delete on the iPod. My Nano could quickly fill up this way.

My workaround is a little program called Yamipod which seems to let me explore my iPod directly, find these orphaned podcasts, and delete them.

I guess it's a bug, and searching Apple's forums suggests that I'm not the first to have this issue. Suggestions included starting afresh by restoring my iPod to factory settings! Except that some of my "music" (in particular Audiobooks), I've archived off to hard drives to keep my PC clean. Plus, that's not a very neat solution is it?

And while I'm at it, why is it so hard to rip spoken words CDs and have them displayed as Audiobooks? If you buy an audiobook on iTunes or through Audible things are fine, but I tend to either have mp3s to transfer or CDs to rip. The only route seems to be renaming files as *.m4b rather than *.m4a files and "deleting" the music files while re-importing the folder with the *.m4b files. The reason that I want to have Audiobooks separately managed is that it keeps the menus clean for when I'm looking to listen to either spoken word or music, and it ensures that I don't have chapters of books turning up mid-shuffle. Audiobooks also automatically bookmark where you've got to. Actually, Audiobooks is a bit of a mess with all the chapters placed into a single folder rather than being able to choose "Titles" and then "Chapters". And yes, I do "Join Tracks" when I rip a CD to minimise chapter points.

I've only recently started to use iTunes fully by linking it to an actual iPod, so I'm a bit surprised that some relatively basic things are so complicated to achieve considering Apple seems to release new versions of iTunes on a very regular basis. This isn't all just because I'm using Windows is it? Is all sweetness and light in OS X?

Well - PVRs or DVRs - whatever the correct phrase is.

"Sky+ has changed my life!"

This is a phrase you hear all too frequently. This must be a truly wonderous invention then?

Well, having now experienced it first hand, I must admit that it is really pretty good. But you know what? Some things are done better by my £94.99 PVR (Now £79.99) - a Digifusion FVRT95.

What I'm not going to compare are channel options. Obviously this is pretty important, but I'm examining the technology here.

Why Sky+ is better:

• Well it's got a dual tuner. So you can watch one thing and record another. Indeed, you can record two programmes and either watch one of them or playback a recording simultaneously.
  
• Sky support. Aside from a dodgy box initially, I've not suffered any technical difficulties with my Sky+, but at least I know that the Sky R&D department is busily working on bug fixes and improvements all the while. Access Devices who worked on the excellent software on my Digifusion have gone bust which may mean seeing no more upgrades for my device in the future.
  
• Series link. I think that this might be coming with Freeview Playback, but I've yet to see the definitive list of specifications.
  
• Programme reminders that pop up during trailers to let you either remind you of a programme or set a recording for it.
  
• Texting Sky+. Or setting your PVR via the web. Pretty useful; very cool.
  

Why the Digifusion is better:

• The programme guide is neater. A minimised screen of what you're watching remains on the screen when you're browsing either your recordings or the programme guide. Sky+ stops your viewing altogether if you want to do this. You also have to go into a setup option to turn off the muzak that accompanies the guide by default.
  
• Skipping. Advertisers and commercial broadcasters hate this. Indeed I note that in the Freeview Playback marketing logo guidelines (p17 of the PDF), companies are specifically from promoting "functionality that enable viewers to skip or fast forward through advertisements." Wow. You certainly wouldn't want anyone to know that you can fast forward the ads would you? (Don't forget that ITV actually wanted speeds limited as part of the Freeview Playback spec.) Well Sky+ lets you go up to 30x when fast-forwarding. My Digifusion lets you go 48x, or even better, skip a preset number of minutes altogether. I have it set at 3 mins which means I can avoid seeing the ads completely.
  
• Easier access to pre-recorded programmes. I'm really not sure why Sky+ doesn't have a button to take me directly to the "Planner". Instead I have to go to TV Guide and then press Green. On my Digifusion, I can get straight to this list in one button press.
  
• Radio is on the programme guide. I'm really not sure why Sky+ doesn't offer this. They're given the programme details and they charge stations to be on the system. So why you can't see anything apart from the current programme is beyond me. This also makes it harder to record radio programmes as it's back to the old-style VCR manual timer-recording process.
  
• Programme info for other channels without switching over. Sky+ insists that you either go to the programme guide or switch to the channel to see the info. My freeview box may only have Now & Next without opening the guide (although I can still watch TV doing this) but I can read a description of other shows without leaving my current one.
  
• Displaying programmes set to be recorded in the programme guide. Very simply, shows are highlighted in red if I hit "R" and similarly un-highlighted if I press the button again. For some reason Sky+ doesn't offer this.
  

To be honest, aside from missing a second tuner and obviously the channel choice, my Freeview box offers some serious improvements over Sky+. The graphics aren't quite as neat, but they're not bad. And I can think of a few extra changes I'd add - a series link facility, and the ability to specify how many minutes early to start a recording eg. 1 minute before the scheduled start.

But it's really pretty damned good.

Happy New Year by the way. I spent it watching Charlie Brooker's excellent Screenwipe which included the best wrap up of UK TV I've seen or read this year (OTT's isn't bad, but I don't agree with everything they say. Maybe I'll write more on this another time).

I thought I'd write a brief review of the recently released Bush Wi-Fi radio. With the growing number of home networks being set up, this has to be a growth area for radio, and I've only really been waiting for prices to fall far enough to buy one.

This particular model can be purchased at Argos for £119.99 currently, although I also hear that it's available for £80 + VAT at Makro if you've got one of their trade cards.

Anyway, back to the product in hand. Setting it up was really very simple with a quick scan for local networks and then a prompt to enter any appropriate passwords. There's also a process for networks with hidden SSIDs so everyone should be catered for.

A couple of quick station listing updates (via Reciva), and I was away.

The three main options at the start are Stations, Media Player and Configure. I jumped to Stations, then selecting first Location, then Europe and then the UK which has 484 stations listed. First up had to be Virgin Radio. The sounds was good with nice bass considering that there's only a single speaker on the unit.

The buffering was very quick, and under the station name, a second line told me that it's Real Enabled. But another piece of text told me that it was actually using the 128k MP3 stream that Virgin offers. That made it sound awfully good. Plugging headphones in, just showed the quality of the audio - it was much better than our usual DAB signal, but I'll leave that argument to others.

128k MP3 streams were also used for Virgin Radio Xtreme, Virgin Radio Classic Rock and Virgin Radio Groove, or "Virgin Radio G" as it comes up on the somewhat limited display.

Flicking over to Talksport, a station I'd never ordinarily listen to, revealed what happens when you use too little bandwidth for streaming. Their 20k WMA stream was worse than a decent AM signal. I found it pretty unlistenable. The buffering took longer as well.

Over on Capital Radio, the 32k WMA was only marginally better, but disappointing for a music station. The buffering wasn't as bad as it was for Talksport, but really this isn't up to DAB or FM in quality.

Similarly, Classic FM was also only on a 32k WMA stream, but the piece of music I listened to wasn't as bad sounding as Shakira had been on Capital.

Moving over to the BBC, I tuned to BBC Radio 3. Choosing a BBC station gives you a choice of Live or On Demand. I chose live, and after a pre-roll informing me that I was listening to the streaming version of the station, it was onto the service which was encoded in a 44k Real format. I suspect that Real is the default option when there are choices, but that tends to be the BBC default anyway since it's available on more platforms. Listening via headphones, the unit had good sound to the live concert that was being broadcast when I was testing it. You could hear a little "noise" in some quieter moments though. Reasonably acceptable, although not as good as a strong FM or DAB signal.

What's really powerful about the BBC's offering, is of course, the On Demand listening. Choosing On Demand from Radio 4, I was presented with an up to date list of current programmes. If there are multiple editions, then I get a day by day breakdown to choose the one I want to hear.

Some stations, like Virgin Radio, have a variety of streams available to listen, and the radio doesn't really give you the option to choose. That's down to Reciva picking the appropriate one.

It's worth noting that I didn't do anything too bandwidth heavy whilst listening. So no torrents or anything, but I did download a couple of sizeable files whilst listening to Virgin and BBC stations, without any interruptions or buffering.

Listening to the odd on demand programmes, I did notice the occasional break-up, and the BBC has that slightly annoying habit of changing bit-rates mid-stream. But it's all very good.

There's one more part of this radio that really needs addressing. As I've mentioned, Reciva are responsible for the station list. They supply the list to pretty much all the available wi-fi radios currently on the market. If you go to the Reciva website you can register your set online which creates a "My Stuff" section which lets you add your own streams and station favourites. So, although there are ten presets built in for favourites, you can have more by going to the My Stuff menu option.

Adding streams is especially useful if you want to use a higher quality version of a stream than the one offered by default. Unfortunately, none of the three I've tried so far has worked. I listen to Paul Harris on KMOX a bit, and CBS has an annoying new system of making you register before you get a player launched. Discovering the exact stream took a bit of detective work. But although it works in Windows Media Player, the radio fails to play the stream.

What's really curious is that there is precisely no mention of Reciva or its website and the functionality it offers, anywhere in the Bush manual. You just have to "know" to get there.

I do think that some radio stations need to ask some serious questions about the quality that they're currently using to encode their streams. As more people start to get these radios (and I've heard that one manufacturer is planning on building wi-fi into most of their digital radios in the future), sub-standard streaming is going to become as issue. And only offering streams locked into players is not going to be enormously helpful, unless the stations at least let Reciva know what the real addresses of their streams are.

The only two things I can say at this early stage that could do with improving are the size of the display, which is a little small, and the shame that there's no way of getting some of the scrolling text that various players can offer. Obviously with no single standard for players, this latter is going to be a problem.

Still, all said and done, the ease with which you can just listen on demand to programming when you feel like it without booting up a computer, makes this a killer device. Roll on the advent of listening on demand in commercial radio in the UK.

By the way, it's probably a bit misleading of Argos to print details on DAB Digital Radio in their catalogue in the entry for this unit. There's no DAB or AM/FM on this product. They even print the DAB logo. Mind you, the photo shows the radio as having an antenna when it doesn't.

If you're familiar with the alphabet, you'll appreciate that any list of names sorted in alphabetical order that includes mine, will place me somewhere near the top. Indeed, unless you have friends named Aaron, Abraham, Abel or Abi, I'm quite possibly heading your list. Now think about your mobile phone contact list, and you'll appreciate that when you want to, say, send me a text, it's not hard to find my name. It's right there at the top!

On the other hand, if you don't want to send me a text message, it's also quite easy to inadvertantly send it to me anyway since a slip of the finger means that you've selected me.

Now consider a couple of possibilities. Your phone's unlocked, and one of its softbuttons says the following in sequence if you keep pressing it: "New Message" "Add Recipient" "Select Contact" "Send Message" [Return to start].

You might begin to appreciate that a phone in your pocket alongside, perhaps, a particularly angled key or coin, and you could be repeatedly pressing that softbutton a lot of times.

Guess what? That means that the person at the top of the list can get multiple blanks texts. And let me tell you, it happens more often than you think.

Other things that can happen to those lucky enough to appear at the top of phone lists include misdirected texts when the sender's inebriated. Certainly I've had very curious texts arrive on my phone in the early hours of the morning which are occassionally followed by "Please ignore my last text" messages.

Then there's straightforward calls from your pocket. One colleague repeatedly phoned me from a trip to Russia, running up an expensive bill. Even turning my phone off just meant that my voicemail got filled with rubbish. I've heard plenty of ambient train and car travel noises, as well as the background sounds from pubs and bars.

My top tip to you, if you're phone is inclined to make calls or texts without your assistance, is to enter a dummy "AAA" name at the top with a number that can't be dialled like "1". Think of all the money you'll save?

If you're familiar with the alphabet, you'll appreciate that any list of names sorted in alphabetical order that includes mine, will place me somewhere near the top. Indeed, unless you have friends named Aaron, Abraham, Abel or Abi, I'm quite possibly heading your list. Now think about your mobile phone contact list, and you'll appreciate that when you want to, say, send me a text, it's not hard to find my name. It's right there at the top!

On the other hand, if you don't want to send me a text message, it's also quite easy to inadvertantly send it to me anyway since a slip of the finger means that you've selected me.

Now consider a couple of possibilities. Your phone's unlocked, and one of its softbuttons says the following in sequence if you keep pressing it: "New Message" "Add Recipient" "Select Contact" "Send Message" [Return to start].

You might begin to appreciate that a phone in your pocket alongside, perhaps, a particularly angled key or coin, and you could be repeatedly pressing that softbutton a lot of times.

Guess what? That means that the person at the top of the list can get multiple blanks texts. And let me tell you, it happens more often than you think.

Other things that can happen to those lucky enough to appear at the top of phone lists include misdirected texts when the sender's inebriated. Certainly I've had very curious texts arrive on my phone in the early hours of the morning which are occassionally followed by "Please ignore my last text" messages.

Then there's straightforward calls from your pocket. One colleague repeatedly phoned me from a trip to Russia, running up an expensive bill. Even turning my phone off just meant that my voicemail got filled with rubbish. I've heard plenty of ambient train and car travel noises, as well as the background sounds from pubs and bars.

My top tip to you, if you're phone is inclined to make calls or texts without your assistance, is to enter a dummy "AAA" name at the top with a number that can't be dialled like "1". Think of all the money you'll save?

Technology Guardian has a front page piece on proposals to extend the lifespan of copyright on music, from 50 years to 95 years. Why 95 years? Well because that's what it is in America.

Actually, the real rush is because music recorded in the 1950s is now coming out of copyright and in 2012, in time for the Olympics, the first Beatles tracks will be out of copyright. As the article points out, that doesn't mean that you don't have to pay anything since publishing royalties are payable to the artist for 70 years beyond the artist's death. But it does mean that I'd be free to repackage those early Beatles songs and as long as I paid the royalties holder (in this instance Sony after Michael Jackson sold them on - I believe he may have been short of a bob or two), I can release my collections.

I've been through this before, and regular readers will know that I'm fundamentally opposed to an extension.

The tenet of the Guardian piece was actually more to do with the various British libraries being unable to legally make copies of pieces of music that are falling to bits before their eyes. While legislation to allow them to make copies as they need to is welcome, extension to 95 years seems to just be for the benefits of record companies who somehow haven't been able to fully monetise their opportunity over a period of FIFTY YEARS.

There's also the small matter of all the non famous material that's locked up in those archives. Whilst anything of any significant commercial interest will either be released by the company itself, or licenced to another label, there is more locked in there. And releasing DRM-locked electronic versions is not a long-term viable answer.

In the meantime, I still don't own a Beatles album, since they're possibly the most over-priced classic albums on sale in the UK today and I refuse to be gouged.

The BBC has released some news "vodcasts" of things like Newsnight and the News at Ten. Except that these are weekly highlights packages rather than full nightly editions. Still better than nothing.

But I wish I could get them to work on my PSP. I don't have a video iPod (or a normal one for that matter), and I'd like to be able to copy them across onto the portable digital media player that I do have.

But it seems that simply renaming them MAQ*****.MP4 files as usual doesn't work. I know I could probably transcode the file with something or other, but it seems stupid to have to do that with an MP4 file as it stands. And it'd be hoped that, like Google Video, the Beeb would offer a choice of formats for major video playing devices (and the PSP is a major platform).

A good piece on Mediaguardian about HD, with Sky's service launching today, and material already being available to some Telewest customers.

I tend to think that it won't take off quite as quickly as some would hope, since we've alredy got more definition with PAL, compared to the US NTSC format. We've also had widescreen for quite a while now. We're certainly all buying HD ready TVs, but that's really a by product of the cheaper and more readily available flat screen LCD and plasma TVs that are now on the market. They're HD ready by default.

Undoubtedly, some will be jumping to upgrade their Sky or Telewest systems, but for most it'll be a natural progression rather than a quick jump. Allied to the fact that we still don't know which format will win out in the Hi Def DVD market, complications over various DRM systems, and suddenly it's only the early adopters who'll be jumping in - at least until Sky end up giving away the boxes to all their customers.

HD won't move as fast in Britain as some expect. Certainly not as fast as it has in the States.

Orange just sent me an email promoting their usual stuff - films, music, downloads etc. I was curious about what they were doing with V for Vendetta, so I followed the link. There I learnt I could download various media... except that I can't.

Each time the 247 code that I should text to receive my downloads appears, alongside it is an asterisk that explains that "this service is unavailable on all Orange SPV phone, the PalmOne Treo and the LG U8150."

So let's be clear. The service will not work on any of Orange's own-brand phones - that is to say, their SPV range.

Brilliant.

Of course, why precisely I'd want to spend £2 on a wallpaper that I could make myself in about 30 seconds using the PC wallpapers available free from the official site, is not something to worry about here.

Similarly, I can't download ringtones or "voicetones" at the princely sum of £3.00-£3.50 each. Shame.

On a different matter, when is Orange going to release a Windows Smartphone with WiFi built in? Sadly the SPV 600, which would otherwise be my next phone, doesn't have it. Is there something around the corner? I know they don't want me making calls via Skype with it, hence cutting them out of the revenue stream. The M600 could be the answer, but it seems more of a PDA than a phone.

For the last twelve weeks, the Ricky Gervais podcast has been at the top of the iTunes chart in both Britain and the US. Indeed it even got awarded a Guinees Book of Records award as the most listened to podcast (albeit that there are other podcasts out there, distriubtedly significantly beyond iTunes, that may also be potential bestsellers).

Given that Ricky Gervais has a commercially strong product, the question was bound to be asked: "Why don't we charge for each episode?"

Well now, it seems, they are.

Now I've listened for the last 12 weeks and enjoyed the programme, going back each week, but I won't be forking out, even 95p, for further editions. Advertising support I can appreciate, but it's not so good that I'd actually pay for what effectively are just ramblings. While they may do some preperation for the show, I don't feel I'd be paying for skilled performers giving us material that I'd otherwise not get. It's good radio - and all the radio I listen to is free (or paid for via advertising or my value-for-money licence fee).

It's a shame that the BBC has yet to offer any of its comedy programming as podcasts - I suppose there's too much value in selling CDs later. To that end, I must recommend Virgin Radio's very own Al Murray as one of the best free comedy shows that you can now download, for free, in a non-proprietry format. And while you're at it, get The Geoff Show too.

There's another reason why I won't be buying it. The deal has been done with Audible. Now Audible programming is available via iTunes, but without first burning the show onto CD and then re-ripping, that's no use for my Creative Zen Touch or Sony PSP. And in any case, even at its highest quality, I'm not especially happy with the sound quality of Audible's codecs. I have bought a couple of books and plays via iTunes, and been through the 'burning a CD and then ripping it back' process and it doesn't do the sound any favours.

Virgin Mobile has announced the launch of their mobile with TV service.

Conspicuously absent from the press release are:
the cost of the service to consumers
what the TV channel package actually consists of
and when it'll be available from.

So, just the salient points then.

Nokia are making phones with wi-fi that'll enable them to make VoIP calls. (They're not the first, incidentally).

I'm guessing that Orange, and some of the other networks, won't be offering these phones in a hurry to their customers. The networks are desperate enough for revenues as it stands. They certainly don't want us making free calls when they could be earning revenue.

As things stand, the phones that get market share are the phones that are adopted by one or more of the networks. If your phone's not adopted by a network to offer to new customers or upgraders with a subsidy, then you're just left with the unlocked phone market where phones sell at significantly higher prices.

At the moment, this unlocked market is pretty small, but a move like this from Nokia could increase things. The only problem is that large numbers of outlets on the high street are now aligned with one or other network. So where do you buy these unlocked phones?

Emily Bell in today's Mediaguardian:

Watching television on your mobile is a stupid idea. Nobody will do it for any length of time at any sustained cost. But obviously the expansion of what is considered to be a mobile - size of a matchbox or size of a front door - will expand and so will the rationale for paying.

Meanwhile Endermol is reported (free reg. reqd.) to be producing "high-quality programming and compelling interactive content" for BT's forthcoming broadband TV service.

Let's leap ahead and consider Big Brother on a mobile phone for a subscription. That might work. Ot#s sto;; a waste of spectrum.

I noticed the handsets for Tesco's VOIP service at the weekend. They come in at a very reasonable £19.97 (whats with the .97 price point?). But I don't want to use Tesco's service particularly. So can I use the handsets with Skype?

Sadly, plenty of Googling reveals nothing obvious.

If you want to see film trailers, the best place to visit is, of course, Apple's Quicktime Trailer site. Indeed the main reason to continually upgrade your version of Quicktime is so that you can see things like the latest V for Vendetta trailer in all their glory. Unsurprisingly video iPod downloads are available for many of the films too.

So this begs the question, why doesn't Sony have a PSP trailer site of a similar style? Yes, if I visit the site of the big 2006 Sony Pictures films, such as The Da Vinci Code's website, I can download the trailer for PSP. But that's in the minority.

I don't know how many video iPods have been sold compared with PSPs, but if I were Sony, I would put together a big site with trailers from other film companies as well as my own. It's really not counter-intuitive for Sony to be effectively promoting their competitor's films since most consumers choose to see films based on their content, not their distributing company. And you can can buy UMDs of films from most major studios.

Sony Connect is supposedly being relaunched soon with the PSP to be an intergral part of the landscape. To get people using the site, allowing you download free movie trailers would be a smart move - the same way Apple gets you using iTunes to get free podcasts. Once you're there and registered, actually buying something is a hop and a step away.

Today's Letter's and blogs section of Technology Guardian's worth reading!