Posted by: Jane Douglas

Phones, phones, phones
Two newly unveiled phones come top of the gadget news heap this week:

LG’s GD510 Pop, a three-inch touchscreen available on pay as you go for under £100, and the Xperia X10, Sony Ericsson’s first phone to run Google’s mobile OS, Android.

I’ve also just had the colossal HTC HD2 (pictured, with an iPhone on the left for scale) land on my desk. It’s the first Windows phone to feature a capacitive touchscreen, and it’s a big, crisp-looking one at that: 480 by 800 pixels, 4.1 inches across.

Compared to the resistive screen on the similarly sized 4.1-inch Toshiba TG01 Windows phone, the HD2’s touch display is a smooth, responsive dream. That’s the very first impression – I’ll be slapping in a SIM, test driving it over the weekend and back with more next week.

American beauties
Also, newly launched US-to-UK shipping service Bundle Box thinks it can save gadget lovers money by letting shoppers register for a free US postal address, then have a package of cheap(er) electronics delivered home via that address in two weeks or so.

We asked them to put together a sample bundle of American bargains and US-exclusive gadgets and they came up with:

Microsoft Zune HD 16GB: $219 (£132)
Microsoft Zune HD 32GB: $289 (£175)
Kindle, 6-inch, US & International Wireless: $259 (£157)
Sony Reader Touch Edition: $299 (£181)
Apple iMac, 27-inch display, 3.06GHz: $1700 (£1028)
Blu-Ray box set, Michael Jackson: This Is It: $28 (£17)

Which would run to a total, with £506 added for the service, import duty and VAT, to £2196 in all. That’s a lot of gadget for the money – albeit for someone who has a couple of grand to spare…

On Tech & Gadgets
Meanwhile, back at cash-strapped Tech & Gadgets headquarters:

 
Review: Nikon S1000pj


Wired: on the art of moneygami

In pictures: Modern Warfare 2

Guest blog: David McCarthy, Rising Star Games

Starting today, David McCarthy (Rising Star Games and former deputy editor of Edge magazine) is going to be guest blogging for us direct from Japan on the games scene over there. Read his first post below and check back for more from David every fortnight.

Land of the Rising Star

"Man, Japan is over. We're done. Our game industry is finished."

That's how Capcom's Keiji Inafune felt after walking round this year's Tokyo Game Show, apparently. Inafune is best known as the creator of Mega Man, Onimusha and Dead Rising, but he's also had a hand in the Resident Evil series, the original Street Fighter, and about a million other of Japanese developer Capcom's greatest hits. It's difficult to argue with someone who has such vast experience in the world of videogames. But he's wrong.

Ever since I first visited Japan, several years ago, people have been using the Tokyo Game Show to predict the end of Japanese gaming. Japanese kids are all too busy sending emails on their phones, they'd say, or games like Grand Theft Auto are too dominant, leaving no room for Japanese games to find success outside Japan.

But look at the sales charts in the UK or US and you're likely to see a top ten full of Japanese games, whether it's familiar names like Tekken and Metal Gear Solid, or newer arrivals, like Professor Layton's latest adventure or Wii Fit. Outside the top ten, you're likely to run into the sort of unconstrained creativity and eccentricity that has given Japan such a well-deserved reputation for videogame brilliance: Valkyria Chronicles, Demon's Souls, No More Heroes, and Flower, Sun and Rain, to name but a few. What's more, one Japanese company, Nintendo, has almost single-handedly transformed videogames in the past few years, opening up rich seams of design innovation, and acquiring entirely new audiences of OAPs and toddlers.

So Keiji Inafune is wrong. The Japanese games industry is far from finished. Which is why this blog is just starting, to celebrate everything about Japanese gaming - the good, the bad, and the ugly, but also the neon-coloured, spiky-haired, and just plain bonkers.

Read more from David on Hoshi Club at Rising Star Games

Posted by: Nik Taylor

Pressing all your news buttons this week have been the tales that Nokia is going to drag Apple through the courts for alleged copyright infringements, Windows 7 has continued to sell strongly and the government is planning to switch off the internet for anyone who gets a little too into file sharing.

But today, the story we’ve all got our eyes on is coming from the Park Lane Hilton in London. That’s where the  Golden Joystick Awards 2009 will be taking place, and we’ll be there to get all the news as it happens. Follow Jane and myself on Twitter to hear about each award as it’s announced, and go here from 3pm to see a round-up of all the results.

Also on T&G this week

 
Our 10 top mobile phones


The best ever gaming boss battles


Review: Mario & Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games

Posted by: Jane Douglas

When it comes to headphones, sound leakage is my big pet peeve. For two reasons:

1) Having to listen to the tinny beats seeping out of other people’s leaky earphones is annoying.

2) I don’t want other people to know how desperately uncool my musical tastes are.

Anyway. Today I’ve been testing the Reference 430 headphones from JBL (who supplied the audio tech), and Quiksilver girls’ brand Roxy (who supplied the acid-bright styling and pictured carry case). Our loaned pair is the blue-green variant. A pink-orange version is also available.

The ear cups in are on the petite side, possibly designed with teens in mind.

If they fit your delicate lugs, you’ll probably find them comfortable; the padding is covered in a velvety fabric that makes them pretty cosy. I imagine them doubling as a decent pair of earmuffs in the depths of winter.

The funky neon colouring makes the Reference 430 look a bit toy-like, as do the plastic ear cups – not in a cheap way, as the build quality is good, but these ‘phones are certainly not for the audiophile who likes their gear sleek and discreet.

Most importantly, the audio quality – for a £60 headset – is decent. To my ears, the sound is bass-focused; crank up the volume and you’ll get a good rumble going. 

I had been doing just that when I remembered my fellow editor would be suffering whatever sound leakage these headphones let out. Turns out, the Reference 430 headphones aren’t quite leak-proof.

All in all, though I wouldn’t recommend them to you for a long plane journey (at least, not if I’m sat next to you), these are a decent set of headphones: a good first upgrade from white earbuds for the iPod nano generation.

Posted by: Jane Douglas

Among the top stories in tech news this week was the unveiling of the Nook, the promising first e-book reader from US bookseller Barnes & Noble.

It has a small colour touchscreen below the more familiar greyscale e-ink display. Which makes it not entirely unlike (though shorter) than the little-known Alex by Spring Design.

Research on robopets and other technological innovations to help the future elderly also went down a treat. Then there was the Windows 7 launch, of course, with PC World calling it the “fastest selling operating system" in its history.

And following on from last week’s ‘naked’ scanners kerfuffle comes word that a children's rights group has successfully objected to kids being scanned by the X-ray security devices.

The shark that is Tech & Gadgets, meanwhile, never stops swimming:

 
Facebook’s 10 biggest fools

 
Classic sat-nav mishaps

 
Convergence “is a fact”, says Ubisoft

Posted by: Jane Douglas

To mark the launch of the Satio, the world’s first 12.1-megapixel cameraphone, on Vodafone, Sony Ericsson is having photographer Jillian Edelstein snap pictures of 121 eyes in 12.1 hours. See what they did there?

And they don’t mean hurried little point-and-shoot snapshots of your peepers, either. Edelstein is a celebrity portrait photographer who has previously captured on film the likes of Kate Moss, Daniel Day Lewis, Nelson Mandela and Simon Pegg (pictured).

Therefore Sony Ericsson wants 61 volunteers to take part in the 12.1-hour photoshoot in December. Upload your a photo of yourself at the official site for your chance to be “immortalised” as an eye model.

And no, we’re not sure how they’re going to do the 121st eye. (Winking? An eye patch?)

Eyes Wide Open with Sony Ericsson Satio

Posted by: Jane Douglas

Among the tech stories catching eyes this week was the full-body airport scanner (which you may remember caused the same fuss last year) on trial at Manchester Airport.

The airport’s head of customer experience considers it less intrusive than a physical pat-down.

She may or may not be right (more importantly, is it more effective?), but we agree the so-called “naked” images produced are not “erotic or pornographic”. Unless you’re really into grainy, monochrome photocopies.

In other news, Google outlined plans to sell books in a huge online bookstore, which will offer about half a million titles when it launches early next year, including books from third-party stores with which it will share profits.

BlackBerry, meanwhile, is having another bash at its Storm touchscreen smartphone, announcing the Storm2 – this time with Wi-Fi and an improved SurePress clickable screen.

T3 Gadget Awards 2009

This week also brought us the T3 Gadget Awards, at which my esteemed colleague Mr Taylor handed over the prize for New Media Service of the Year (BBC iPlayer HD), with HTC picking up two of the big awards, Gadget of the Year and Phone of the Year, for the smashing HTC Hero.

This week on MSN Tech & Gadgets:

T3 reveals Gadget Award winners

10 historic gadget flops

Review: PES 2010

Posted by: Jane Douglas

This week in gadget news has brought us the arrival of Windows phone (accompanied by a bevy of smart new handsets), Amazon announcing the Kindle for the UK and a phishing scam that publicly compromised thousands of Hotmail users’ passwords.

Meanwhile, back at Tech & Gadgets headquarters, we’ve been primping for next week’s glitzy T3 Gadget Awards, playing with a Livescribe Pulse smartpen and strategically dismembering space zombies in Dead Space: Extraction.

This week on Tech & Gadgets

Wired wishlist: gadget watches

 
10 tasty new gadgets

Review: Uncharted 2

Preview: Assassin’s Creed II

Posted by: Jane Douglas

The T3 Gadget Awards are very nearly upon us. Judgment Day, in fact, has been and gone; the judges’ votes for each of the illustrious prizes have been cast, mine included. Obviously, I’ve been sworn to secrecy on my picks, so you’ll need to stay tuned for the revelations on October 14. Until then, there’s at least a teaser video to watch.

Posted by: Jane Douglas

…for a princely sum of $10,000. But! Only if it’s an old Chocolate handset, and only if it’s got one of five magical serial numbers (see the LG site for details).

Whether it’s a frantic global search for five unique mobiles (the US site says LG “desperately needs to locate the phones”) or a sneaky promotion for the new Chocolate BL20 dressed up like a sudden product recall, it’s gotten our attention. Any guesses?