Gadgets
London Cab Driver Takes on Sat-Nav—and Beats It By 27 Minutes
Posted by Addy Dugdale at 11:25 PM on December 17, 2007
The BBC pitted the wits of a black cab driver against the latest GPS technology in an effort to find out whether man or gadget rules the mean streets of rush-hour London. And, in a result that will not surprise TomTom-challenged Londoners one bit, although the TomTom GO 720 won the first round, Andy the cabbie completely p0wned the Sat-Nav. More info below.

What do you do if you've got the resources of a university nanotechnology group and time on your hands in the run-up to Christmas? Build the world's tiniest Advent Calendar, of course.
Au, the people who brought us the rather sexy 


Toshiba has upgraded its 17-inch Qosmio G40 laptop and its smaller brother, the 15-inch F40. The two laptops, the G40/97E and the smaller F40/88EBL now sport HD DVD-RW drives as opposed to HD DVD-R, and will be released in Japan on December 21.
Part Foundry is currently working on a dongle that will bring the long-desired GPS feature to the iPhone. Branded as locoGPS, the device promises true GPS backed by open source software, but if the teaser video is any indication, it may not be the GPS experience you're expecting.
The Remote Play functionality on the PS3/PSP is great, but Sony intends to extensively develop the feature set for broader external connectivity. Sony's CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, appeared in Tokyo and detailed how Sony intends to push the 

Canalys has produced a report showing the iPhone has grown massively in North America. The study looked specifically at smartphone market share statistics in Q3, and the iPhone, in a surprisingly short time span, has managed to grab second position. A 27% market share is nothing to scoff at; what Apple has done in a few months, others have failed to do in years. Smartphones running Symbian, Linux and Palm OS all fall behind Apple's iPhone. This is ever more stunning because the iPhone is only available via one carrier, in contrast, the other platforms can be procured from various cellular networks. This dramatically increases their market penetration. From the perspective of a business model, these figures are simply astronomical. Who's running scared? Apparently, Symbian is:












The X835 digital camera from BenQ has an 8MP sensor, packs in a 3x optical zoom and can handle sensitivities of up to ISO 2000 during still image capture. The ISO sensitivity during video capture is set at a maximum of 6400. The addition of such functionality comes at a price; the noise in the captured images will probably be enough to cause an avalanche in the Alps from an 800 kilometre distance.
According to the IT staff at Morrisville State College, Microsoft's Xbox 360 console—without the use of a Wi-Fi adapter—seems to be interfering with 2.4GHz signals like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on campus. Aside from loads of anecdotal evidence of computers not connecting to the school's wireless LAN network and Bluetooth headsets needing to physically touch phones to pair, the started analysing the 2.4GHz spectrum and made an interesting finding. When studying the signal in problem areas, they noticed a peculiar, strong signal that jumped all over the 2.4GHz band...that their diagnostic software labelled as "unknown emitter."
Now this is a sad story...if it's true. According to this alleged school report, one student received a detention for using Firefox—as opposed to IE or Safari, we assume. And while there could be plenty of explanations for why the school would want to control student browsers, we loved the teacher's write-up of the event:
SANTA'S FACTORY, North Pole (Agencies) - An Imperial Stormtrooper commando broke into Santa's Factory in the North Pole yesterday evening, killing an undetermined number of elves, arresting its owner and confiscating his sled. Joe Kwazansky, local spokesman for the Evil Galactic Empire in Los Angeles, appeared in a press conference this morning confirming the rumours of an Imperial takeover of Christmas' celebrations. "The Emperor wants to assure His subjects that Xmas will continue as planned. The pug-nosed fatso, however, will pay for his crimes," Mr. Kwazansky said amidst the palpable shock in the press corps.
The folks at Unwired View have received a leaked shot of a new Sony Ericsson clamshell phone, which totes the Z660i moniker. Besides 3G connectivity, 2MP camera and a thickness of 14mm, not an awful lot is known about the metal clad cellphone. In fact, we cannot be certain the phone even exists.
A couple of weeks back, our Dear Leader Blam sent round an email asking the team what we wanted for Christmas. So I thought. And I thought. And all I could come up with was this:
Prince Charles will appear as an "hologram" at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi. The system uses a video projector, a screen and a transparent foil to give the illusion that the royal is there, on stage. Apparently, he wants to avoid wasting the resources of flying 7,000 miles with his staff. And of course, previous criticism by the press: