Posts

Posted on

Free TomTom adapter for iPhone 4

Back in July I wrote a blog post about the problems of using the then new iPhone 4G with the existing TomTom iPhone Car Kit.

My main concern now though is compatibility with the iPhone 4. It does click in, but you wouldn’t want to do it too often. However even if you do click it in, there is no connection made with the Car Kit, so no charging and I guess no enhanced GPS.

You can , according to the internet tubes, add some padding that will allow it to work, but not tried that yet.

I would like TomTom to offer upgrades to an iPhone 4 model or even free upgrades would be nice.

Well if you head on over to the TomTom website you can claim a free adapter for your iPhone 4G to allow it to work properly with the Car Kit.

Excellent and well done TomTom.

Posted on

Airport Extreme reliability failing

As mentioned before on the blog, my Airport Extreme is becoming less reliable. I am having to reboot it at least once a week now. There is no warning before it goes dodgy.

I am going to wait before replacing it, as we are getting BT Infinity later this month and I am not sure if I will need a new router. If I do need a specific type of router then I will get a new 802.11n router.

Posted on

£99 Apple TV

Yes!

Well nearly yes!

Apple today announced their new Apple TV. A quarter of the size of the original Apple TV, no hard drive and a much lower price.

£99 is a much nicer price than the £200+ of the older version.

The main downside is a lack of storage, however streaming is possible from both Macs and iOS devices so not too much of an issue. My experiences of 802.11n streaming is that it does work fine and is much better than 802.11g wifi. I am thinking though that the iPad and the iPhone use the slower 2.4GHz 802.11n and my 802.11n network runs at 5GHz I may need to add a third wireless network at home if I want to stream from my iPad.

Posted on

New Apple TV

Well Apple are holding an event on the 1st September for the press.

Generally at this time of year we see Apple announce their new iPod line up for the festive season.

With sales of traditional iPods falling I suspect (as others do) that there may be a limited refresh of the traditional iPod line, but the real focus of this event will be a new iPod touch and a new iOS4 based Apple TV (or iTV as Apple want to call it). There are also rumours of an iPad refresh, not sure how reliable that is, but we will be getting iOS 4 for the iPad about now and I do wonder if the delay was down to a refreshed iPad with Facetime camera? There are also other rumours of a 7″ iPad.

What really interests me is the new Apple TV. I have been considering buying one for some time now and keep putting it off. Using a Mac mini has solved many of my issues with pushing video and music from my computer to the front room, however this is only a temporary solution. In the long term I need to choose between getting another Mac mini or getting an Apple TV. The new rumoured $99 Apple TV actually might be a real solution and in many ways could work alongside a Mac mini!

Will be interesting to see what is in fact announced on the 1st September.

Posted on

Google Chrome Tablet

Download Squad are claiming that there will be a Google Chrome Tablet coming on the 26th of November.

Yes, our source tells us that Google is building a Chrome OS tablet. It’s real, and it’s being built by HTC.

HTC of course made the Nexus One.

Sounds interesting, might get one.

Doubt it will be as good as the iPad, but you never know!

Posted on

Airport Extreme

My 802.11n Airport Extreme base station is starting to be a little unreliable over the last few weeks.

I bought it in 2007 and it has worked pretty much flawlessly over that timeframe.

The only real difference to my network is that I have started using my iPad on the network.

Is this the cause?

Who knows!

Posted on

Axon Haptic

Now this is an interesting concept.

A 10″ tablet that underneath runs Darwin. As a result though the tablet can run both Windows and Linux, you can also run Darwin on the device too. This means that if you wanted to and were willing to breach Apple’s EULA you could install Snow Leopard on the device quite easily!

The tablet has a front facing camera, three USB ports, an SD Card slot, display port, wifi, Bluetooth and GPS.

Though the key for this device on whether it is any good is whether the touchscreen is as good as the sort of touchscreens that Apple uses.

At $750 (£480) this is quite cheap, but will be interesting to see whether the device will move from concept to production.

Find out more.