We’re just a few weeks from Christmas yet the biggest online retailer has failed to present its top selling new gadget to the British public. Unavailable anywhere outside of the USA, the Kindle Fire has a ready made killer app in the shape of the Amazon website, but unless you have a kind friend, uncle or plane ticket, anyone in Europe and the Far East who wants a Kindle Fire tablet will have to wait.

Does it make sense for Amazon to hold off? It’s difficult to say. Reviews have been largely positive (unless you read Apple-centric papers such as the Telegraph) so there seems to be every reason for Amazon to supply some of their Android-based 7 inch slates for buyers in the UK, Germany, France and other European countries.

At the very worst, this would have resulted in shortages in the USA, something that other companies have turned to their advantage on many occasions over the years.

Similarly, we have the (temporarily?) revived HP TouchPad available for £300 in the UK and just £120 in the USA. Even with VAT this doesn’t seem right, and is of course the result of the endless “rip of Britain” pricing on electronic goods that has dogged gadget fans for many years.

With Samsung prevented from selling their latest tablet in the majority of territories thanks to Apple’s unjust legal actions the only avenue to acquiring a decent alternative to the iPad is to choose the Motorola Xoom or the HTC Flyer, the latter of which doesn’t have Honeycomb installed yet. The Eee Pad Transformer from ASUS is a good option, but has the status of proto-laptop rather than out-and-out tablet.

Or, a canny shopper might look for friends and relatives in the USA who might be able to help out by purchasing a Kindle Fire or HP TouchPad on their behalf, sending it through customs as a gift.

But what if you don’t have a friend who can help?

Fortunately we’re living in the modern age, which means that by checking any of the following websites you can find a service that will allow you to shop in the USA. These sites either provide a proxy US-based address for you to ship your goods to before having them forwarded, or offer a fully proxy online shopping service.

• www.vpost.com
• www.shipito.com
• www.comgateway.com
• www.borderlinx.com

But what about payment? Don’t worry, as this can also be handled. If you don’t have a US credit card, using payment services via these sites can get you around that potential landmine, allowing you to shop for cheap electricals in the USA from the comfort of the UK!

I’ve always felt that the hardcore mobile phone market – the one the developed from the PDA/smartphone users as opposed to the Nokia kids – was pretty partisan. For instance, I’ve been literally dragged from using my Windows Mobile to use an Android phone. Similarly, an old friend of mine won’t touch anything other than a BlackBerry.

Although relatively new, Android phones were attracting the same sort of dedicated, evangelical users before the first HTC Dream/G1 was even available to buy!

So it came as some surprise to find that a good friend of mine had traded in his brand new HTC Desire in order to jump on the Apple iPhone 4 train to super coolness and uber-styledom.

This friend – who will remain nameless for fear of recriminations from the Geek Police – had previously owned the HTC Dream and saw the HTC Desire as the perfect Android device that it is.

What prompted his decision to throw away what is to all intents and purposes the best phone on the planet at the moment at the moment in favour of the most stylish, awe-inspiring and marketable second-best phone?

A girl.

Seriously. I could hardly believe it myself, but it’s true.

He’d met this girl at a party recently after finishing a particularly lucrative contract, and she had apparently become insistent that he ditch the Android in favour of a brand new Apple iPhone 4. She even made him do it offered to take him to the local mobile store in order that he would feel “at one” with the mobile technology that he should be using.

Now this has been related to me by a third party, so I’m not entirely sure of the veracity of all of this. However, I it seems that they’ve now moved in together, if the number of happy emails with the prologue “Sent from my iPhone 4″ are anything to go by.

Of course, the thing is, if the above account is true, the lady concerned made a big song and dance of actually going to a high street branch in order to sell the experience and the phone to my friend. He could have shopped online, such as at http://www.dialaphone.co.uk.

So the moral of this story? Android phones are pretty cool, but girls really love the Apple iPhone 4!

The computer was sold as damaged citing problems with the display – however upon opening the rear panel, I discovered that every single capacitor was fine!

So began a crawl of the World Wide Web which took in the insane as well as the more practical (and sensible) fix of taping up some coins and mounting them inside the iMac, between the processor shielding and the back panel.

Closing the computer adds pressure to the CPU – and with a bit of heat from the processor after it gets going, the on screen display glitch is all but gone!

Enabling visitors at MWL2010 to keep up-to-date with real-time feeds, this new app also provides a wealth of practical information on exhibitors and itineraries. With augmented reality geotagging offering detailed information on the best places to grab post-exhibition dinner, drinks and hotels, this iPhone app looks a surefire winner.

Making use of the iPhone camera, and combining image recognition with augmented reality, the revolutionary MWL2010 iPhone app is packed with the latest digital technology. The app’s image recognition function enables visitors to source exhibitors’ Twitter feeds, websites and contact numbers, simply by pointing their iPhone at the exhibitor’s logos.

Augmented reality geotagging comes courtesy of The Hedonists’ Guide, and enables the user to locate local restaurants, bars, clubs and hotels, co-ordinated by the iPhone’s internal GPS to coordinate where the user is in relation to the local amenities. General data is allso on offer to keep the user updated on general show information, Twitter feeds, itineraries, schedules and keynote presentations.

“This app will arm MWL2010 visitors with real-time knowledge of everything going on at Marketing Week Live,” said Mark Choueke Editor of Marketing Week, “and provide them with a fantastically interactive exhibition experience during the two days. Such apps will change the landscape of future exhibitions and we at Marketing Week are delighted to be leading from the front.”

To find out more about MWL2010: www.marketingweeklive.co.uk. To keep up to date with all the news and show updates, follow on Twitter @MWL2010, or visit on Facebook!

Ever since the iPhone came out, we’ve all been obsessed with touch-screen technology. Not that it didn’t exist before then, but it really wasn’t so much in the public eye unless you were using a commercial kiosk or something like that. Now touch-screens are everywhere, but there’s still one thing that the mouse & screen combination can do that the touchscreen never got right: hovering. You can see it in several online applications; the menu that unscrolls when you hover over it, the link that magically appears as the cursor passes over. We could never get it right on touch-screens because it’s basically a binary operation. You’re either touching it, or you’re not.

Folks over at TrueTouch have figured out a way for a screen to actually track how far away your finger is from the screen. So, if it’s close, but not touching, the screen will “see” it, and the operation will register as hovering.  I can totally see this becoming the next big thing in mobile technology. Check out the demo video over at the source article from DVICE.

SOURCE: DVICE

Gone are the smooth curves and seamless sides we’ve seen in previous models. But that doesn’t mean the new iPhone G4 looks bad. In fact, the finished quality of this new design looks perfectly shiny (with apologies to Firefly). If people were starting to lose interest in the iPhone, this is definitely the device that will bring them right back. Check out Gizmodo’s writeup to see their full findings and conclusions.

SOURCE: Gizmodo

Image via Wikipedia

In a keynote today, Steve Jobs and crew introduced the new OS for the iPhone coming this summer. Included in the upgrade are some features that users have been asking for since the very beginning such as multitasking and folders. Other touches of awesomeness include a game center, an improved Mail app and an entirely new platform for advertisement called iAds. These new ads, available straight from Apple for developers to throw into their apps, are a feature-rich multimedia experience coded entirely in HTML5 and they never end the app instance. You stay inside the app and navigate through whatever the advertiser has in store, such as videos, interactive pictures, games, whatever!

If you’re an iPhone user, look for iPhone OS 4 this summer. For a detailed writeup on all the new features, check out Gizmodo’s full coverage.

Earlier this year Microsoft purchased Danger, and the smart money is on a “Zune Mobile software package for Windows Mobile”.

With rumours of Zune support “filtering down” into Windows Mobile, all signs would suggest that Microsoft have finally got hold of the technology they need to make Windows Mobile a realistic challenger to iPhone and iTunes, not to mention the AppStore.

It’s all rather vague though – but what is most interesting about all of this is the reaction on the Engadget page linked to above.

I’ve rarely come across such a load of anti-Windows Mobile sentiment. It’s hard to read.

In a world where iPhone is the public perception of a smartphone, it’s hardly surprising to see people singing the virtues of a slick, sexy device. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t do what it says on the tin.

Adverts need to be faked in order to make the phone look good, and few networks support it to it’s full capability. Yet a Scientology-esque vociferous following pops up on all major tech blogs to blow the iPhone/Apple trumpet and flame anyone who challenges this assumed wisdom.

So – can a ZunePhone survive?

Not in a world with a solid, burgeoning iPhone and iTunes userbase. The Emperors New Clothes are continuing to slip however, and it will be interesting to see which of the tech giants manages to ride out the current economic storm.

iPhones are missing cut/paste (a function pioneered by Apple in the 1970s), a lack of video recording capabilities and an equally bewildering lack of MMS functionality.

Particularly in the UK and Europe, this is a bit of an odd omission, but thankfully the iPhone App-store could be the saviour here, with a company called Mobispine developing an MMS solution.

While they aren’t running the only such solution out there, it is interesting to note that Steve Jobs has repeatedly omitted any mention of MMS in his speeches.

A lot of people online are calling this as a Jobs decision, but AT&T – the only iPhone carrier in the USA – could have a big interest in restricting use of MMS on the device.

Either way, it is unlikely that an MMS application will find its way onto the App-store, except perhaps for European and Asian users.

Incidentally, UK iPhone users can visit iPhoneMMS.net via their device to install a well-regarded MMS application right now!

Just 18 months after the launch of the iPhone went completely over the heads of the guys at Redmond, Ballmer now reckons that Google doesn’t have a business model for Android.

Ever heard of Adsense, Steve?

“If I went to my shareholder meeting, my analyst meeting, and said, ‘Hey, we just launched a new product that has no revenue model, yeah, cheer for me’ — I’m not sure my investors would take that very well,” Ballmer said. “But that’s what Google is telling their investors about Android.”

Seemingly not.

In a week when Google launched voice activated search on the iPhone, Ballmer seems increasingly out of touch with the needs and demands of the mobile OS market.

As CEO of the biggest software supplier on the planet, Ballmer seems to be on the verge of hving to accept some sort of reality check. His dismissal of Android – already available on at least two phones including a HTC device – however is doubly surprising when he omits to refer to Apple as a competitor!

“I’m not saying they’re not going to be a factor, but we’re in a world with Symbian, we’re in a world with BlackBerry, we’re in a world with Linux Mobile,” he said. Google might be a factor someday, but right now these competitors “look a little tougher to me.” “We’ll see what happens to Google in that fight.”

In a world with Windows Mobile 6.1 giving WinMo users a more thumb-friendly interface in the war against iPhone, the Apple device eats into the Symbian/mainstream mobile device OS market and Blackberry is stylistically and culturally welded to the workplace, to dismiss an entry into the mobile market by a company as massive as Google is shortsighted and frankly incomprehensible.

If three years down the line Ballmer (assuming he hasn’t been replaced) utters similar sentiments about a new Nintendo console that is technically superior to the XBox, the console world would be up in arms.

Windows Mobile still has a huge user base, but one that is increasingly disillusioned. While Apple and Blackberry don’t offer decent mobile wordprocessing and other office applications, if either was to suddenly announce something that could be considered suitable to long suffering Windows Mobile users, then the advances made with the OS by HTC in the last 12 months would be lost.

As beautiful as the iPhone interface is, as solid as the Blackberry push-email (and let’s face it a BB is nothing more than a very ornate pager) system is (solid enough to build a brand new market) and as inspiring as the Google Android is, Steve Ballmer needs to be careful with his words.

Now is the time for Microsoft to make wholesale changes to Windows Mobile, bring it up to date and give consumers what they want.

Waiting any longer could seriously damage WinMo’s health.