Now this is a hot topic and naturally something we cannot officially condone. Downloading movies is one of those things that officially is illegal and yet everyone does it.
Until now, you’ve only been able to download movies to your computer from file sharing sites and then jump through technical hoops to reformat them to work on your portable device. Well it was only a matter of time before someone offered downloads straight to your handset and that someone is ZML.
As well as downloads to PCs, ZML offers downloads to iPods and PDAs in a variety of formats playable on mobile devices. The downloads cost $1.99 each and you get a choice of over 1,500 movies both brand new and old classics.
There’s nothing mentioning the legality (or not!) of the site but we have to assume that Hollywood doesn’t see any of the money you pay and that ZML is going to be closed down as soon as Hollywood’s armies of laywers find out about it.
Now what a great idea this is - no more frantic scrabbling around for your Bluetooth headset when your phone rings.
The Star NX788 is a Chinese-made device but it has a feature that might just catch on - a small compartment on the back that stores your Bluetooth headset.
The Star NX788 itself has is pretty basic with dual-band GSM, stereo Bluetooth (A2DP), a 2.6-inch touch screen, 1.3-megapixel camera and microSD card slot. But then you wouldn’t buy this phone for the latest mobile technology - you’d buy it so you’d always have your Bluetooth headset to hand.
There is one problem with this though. As anyone using a stylus-based handset will know, you’re bound to lose it at some point. A replacement stylus costs nothing, but a Bluetooth headset? It could get expensive if you’re a forgetful person.
[Via Intomobile.com]
Watchmaker TAG Heuer is the latest company to sign up with French design house Modelabs for a series of luxury branded mobiles.
TAG Heuer follows in the footsteps of companies like Hummer and Levi Strauss, in agreeing for phones to be made using its name by Modelabs.
No word on what the phone will look like (will it be a watch phone?), nor which celebrity (or celebrities) including Tiger Woods and Lewis Hamilton will be used to tout the handsets, but no doubt TAG Heuer will want to use them.
The first TAG Heuer will be released near the end of next year, so it seems there’s a long way to go before we see the first one.
[Via Reuters]
VSCaller from the wonderfully named VirtualSpaghetti is a contacts manager/phone list that lets you flip through your contacts using a fancy 3D-effect interface.
Contacts can be imported from your phone, and there is a simple way of grabbing portions of larger photos and making them the associated image for a particular contact - useful if you have a group photo rather than several ‘portrait’ snaps.
As you can see from the screen shot, this does look a little tiny bit like Apple’s Cover Flow interface, as seen in iTunes, the iPhone and the newer iPods. I’m sure this is a complete coincidence and Apple won’t mind in the least.
If the Apple similarities do start to get to you however, help is at hand in the form of VSCallers skinnable interface that lets you surround your contacts with fruit, flowers, ‘tribal’ tattoos and other embellishments.
VSCaller costs $14.95 and is available for Windows Mobile versions 5 and 6.
As users of the world’s biggest probably-correct encyclopedia - Wikipedia - will know, a Wiki is an easily-edited collection of linked web pages. What is less well known is how useful a personal wiki can be for organising notes and scraps of information.
Unyverse Mobile Wiki works as a client app for Wikipedia, allowing quick searches and offline browsing. It also lets you maintain a number of other public and private wikiwebs. These act as discussion groups, notepads and contact lists.
This is a lot for a mobile app to cope with (not to mention a lot of typing to perform on a tiny keypad) and so Unyverse works in tandem with a web app that lets you cut ‘n’ paste data and sync it to your mobile.
Unyverse is a free download for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Java phones.
We have seen plenty of innovative applications here at Pocket Picks but this latest one really takes lateral thinking to the next level (perpendicular thinking maybe?). Massage Vibra is a massage application for your phone that uses your handset’s vibration function to sooth your aches and pains.
The application has pre-installed massage programs for almost every region of the body so if you choose ‘Neck’ for example, you then simply follow the onscreen instructions about how to use your phone as a massage tool for that area and start un-knotting that tightly coiled tension you have accumulated throughout the day.
The screens show prompts where you are encouraged to do things like “massage your belly with circular movement clockwise” which although potentially very relaxing might not be the sort of thing you want to do at your desk, lest you draw the startled attention of your co-workers. Even so, it is pretty unique and easily one of the most original uses for a phone’s vibration function we have seen. Massage Vibra is available now and costs a measly £1.98.
(Via Clickapps)
The Carphone Warehouse is pioneering an exclusive ‘green’ mobile phone charger. Now before you start thinking, ‘ooh, that will go lovely with my jungle camo wallpaper’, think again because is all about the environment rather than providing a colourful alternative to the standard black or grey option.
The key innovation is that the charger stops sucking power from an outlet as soon as your device is fully charged as opposed to continuing to drain the socket for as long as it is connected.
Apparently a staggering 95% of energy used by all mobile phone chargers is wasted and unplugging chargers could save consumers £60 million a year and cut CO2 emissions by 250,000 tonnes (which is enough energy to heat 54,000 homes for a whole year). Well that’s just justified it for us anyway and only because we are staunch environmentalists mind, not because we want to save on our electricity bills.
(Via Carphone Warehouse)
When will the mobile internet overtake normal internet? Next week? Never? Nope, it’s neither according to Yahoo!’s Geraldine Wilson who has predicted that 2017 is the year mobile internet use will surpass internet use via a computer or laptop.
Speaking to Total Telecom, Wilson, who is Vice President of connected life at Yahoo! Europe, commented:
Within 10 years more people will be accessing the Internet from their mobile than in the home from a PC.
The argument is that in developing markets where PC use is very low, many people’s first experience of the internet will be via a mobile phone thus encouraging them to stick with that point of access as their familiarity with the web develops. Ten years seems like a fairly safe bet to us, but will mobiles be distinguishable from today’s laptops in terms of features by then? The semantics of what constitutes a *gestures inverted quotation marks* computer may end up getting a little blurry by the time 2017 rolls around.
(Via MocoNews)
If you have shopped around for a new laptop recently you may have seen a few with a little auxiliary display on the front of the lid, This is Windows SideShow - a new feature of Microsoft Vista that displays selected info (new email notifications, weather, etc) even when the laptop is powered down.
SideShow devices have been a little thin on the ground so far - confined mainly to high-end laptops - but that could be about to change.
The SideShow team have released a new development kit that adds support for QVGA displays and Bluetooth connections. As these two features are common to almost every Windows Mobile phone on the market today, this has lead to speculation that the long-promised SideShow mobile phone support might be just around the corner.
Twitter
Recent Comments