Decide what to buy

The BBC is planning a live three-dimensional test broadcast of the Six Nations rugby match between England and Scotland in a little over a week’s time.

Technical details for the Riverside event have not been finalised but
it is understood that three 3D rigs comprising dual Sony HDC950s will
capture the action. One will be positioned up high for wide shots with
two at pitch level. The dual HD streams will be transmitted multiplexed
to down link at Riverside Studios, demultiplexed and combined on
reception before projection onto a large screen for an audience wearing
stereoscopic glasses.

3D HDTV should be pretty lifelike, and they are claiming that the viewing experience will be just like being at Murrayfield.

Meanwhile, if you live in Korea, you can now buy a 3D plasma TV from Samsung at ?1,750,000 or ?2,500,000 for a 42" or 50" model respectively. That’s £935 or £1200 in Sterling, for comparison. For the moment, people buying 3D TVs will be restricted to using them for computer games and a limited number of specially created 3D movies.

Regular live 3D broadcasts are obviously still a little way off, but the technology’s in place: at this rate it might not be that long before we’re all able to watch them. I just hope that the motion sickness problems that have affected 3D TV in the past have been addressed — otherwise, I wouldn’t want to be in the pub when they start showing matches in 3D!

On a related note, you can get a three-dimensional effect and annoy fellow bus passengers with Sony’s new £250 headphones, whose speakers that float just in front of your ears.

As the free-to-air HD satellite service freesat prepares to launch, Sky have announced that they will be adding three more channels to their paid HD service.

Coming over the next couple of months are Sky Movies Premiere HD, Sky Sports 3 HD and FX HD. The Sky Sports 3 channel will be a mixture of content from Sky Sports 3 and Sky Sports Xtra.

These join nine other channels to form Sky’s HD offering.

Sky currently have 400,000 HD subscribers, and about 8.5 million subscribers in total. There are about 7 million HD-ready TVs in the country, so maybe this will encourage some people to fork out £10 more a month for Sky’s premium subscription, and reverse declining audience share.

Earlier today, Reevoo published its list of the top television brands of 2007, as rated by genuine customers using data from Reevoo.com.

As this has already been gaining some interest around the web, I
thought I’d take a closer look at the numbers behind
the top and bottom five.

The top 5 manufacturers are (with average score)

1.    Pioneer (9.2)
2.    Panasonic (9.0)
3.    Sony (8.9)
4.    Samsung (8.7)
5.    LG (8.7)

and the bottom five are:

1.    Swisstec (7.4)
2.    UMC (7.6)
3.    Polaroid (8.2)
4.    Logik (8.2)
5.    Goodmans (8.3)

Congratulations to Pioneer for being the Consumer’s Choice of TV Brand 2007.

Pioneer’s top rating might be a surprise, beating out the larger Sony and Panasonic, but looking at the actual average scores, the plasma manufacturer was well ahead of its rivals, and individual Pioneers often score highly on Reevoo. At the bottom end, Swisstec and UMC branded tellys were far adrift of the competition. It’s worth noting that the top two manufacturers are big-screen, plasma specialists. If nothing else, this affirms the ‘wow’ factor associated with big screens, and provides support for the theory that plasma will maintain a niche in the top end of the TV market for some time to come.

As noted by Andy Merrett at HDTVUK, this is interesting timing for Pioneer, following the announcement earlier this week that they plan to stop making 42" screens in house, in order to concentrate on larger models.

It seems clear that shoppers will be following Pioneer’s plans closely as they decide which television to buy.

Like Stephen Fry, I’m a big fan of the Asus Eee PC. In fact, I’m using one right now to write this! Sure, the screen’s a bit small, and the keyboard’s not for the fattest-fingered typist, but the price, size and resilience are what make it really useful. It’s small and light enough to take anywhere, and the solid state disk has no moving parts to break, which means that you can throw the Eee PC in your bag without the normal laptop paranoia. Reviewers agree that it’s excellent value for money.

Tiny computers have been available for a long time, with Sony and Toshiba in particular making some very small but full-featured devices. However, they’ve typically been expensive, and some of the best ones that they sell in Japan haven’t been available for sale over here. The success of the Eee PC shows that there’s a market for a cheap ultra-portable computer, and it looks like Sony are feeling threatened by it.

According to UMPC Portal, Asus, T-Mobile, and Microsoft are going to make an announcement about the Eee PC and mobile internet access at the CeBIT trade show next month. They surmise that this will be the introduction of an Eee PC model running Windows with an internal 3G data adaptor.

3G internet access would be a natural addition to the Eee. It already has WiFi, but there are plenty of places where WiFi’s not available (or, worse, available only at exorbitant prices). With 3G and a sensible pricing plan, an Eee PC would be ideal for nomadic working. As someone who’s happily running a customised version of Ubuntu Linux on my Eee PC, I’d be aggrieved to pay extra for a copy of Windows, but I know that it will make a lot of people happy.

We’ll find out for certain on 4th March.

Panasonic have released details of their 2008 television line up. And from the looks of it, reports of the death of plasma have been exaggerated.

Panasonic have restricted their LCD range to just 32" and 37" models, with plasma panels available at 37, 42,  46 and 50" sizes. If you’re looking for a smaller screen than that, you’re out of luck.

Given LCD’s decreasing price and increasing share of the 40"+ market, it is a little surprising to see Panasonic sticking to plasmas at the larger sizes. But the evidence from customer reviews does suggest that Pana know plasmas, so why not stick with what you know?

All in all, Panasonic will be releasing 24 new models this year, and there’s a great rundown over at the WhatHiFi televisions blog.

There’s also this helpful guide to the updated Pana model name conventions:

The new Vieras will come in 8-, 80-, 81-, 85- and 800-series varieties,
and as previously, Panasonic drops handy hint in the model name as to
its spec. Hence all 12 Full HD models - all of which fully support
24fps - carry a ‘Z’, while HD Ready TVs feature an ‘X’. Plasma are
denoted by the ‘TH’ prefix and LCDs by ‘TX’.

Hence the TX32LZD80 is a 32in Full HD LCD set

The first models will be hitting the shops in March.

So, the iPhone is pretty sexy, sure. But is it easy to use? Looking around the office, I see quite a lot of bad postures and squinted eyes as people poke their touchscreens.

A gang of Swedish useability experts decided to compare the iPhone’s useability with three competing high-end phones (PDF report). They asked a group of five people to undertake several basic tasks on each phone after having had a chance to play with it for five minutes beforehand. According to the boffins, the iPhone’s interface blew the competition away.

The tasks were:

• make a call by dialing a number manually and then by calling a person from the address book,
• change volume during a call add a new contact to the address book,
• create a new calendar event,
• set the alarm,
• compose and send a text message,
• put the phone in silent mode,
• take a picture and send it to a person in the address book.

Interestingly, they didn’t test how useable the iPhone’s internet features are.

As for the results, four people were able to complete all of the iPhone tasks without any help, and four picked the iPhone as their favourite in the test. The runner up was the Sony Ericsson W910i. According to the Swedes:

In terms of actual performance, the iPhone clearly stands out!

Nokia’s N95 came in third and the HTC TyTN brought up the rear, with only one person able to complete all of the tasks successfully on the Windows Mobile-based device.

Apparently the key to the iPhone’s success is the touchscreen, which has "removed one level of abstraction", so you don’t need multiple buttons to do various parts of a task.

I’d be cautious about reading too much into these results though, which basically show the intuitiveness of the phones’ interfaces, not their long term ease of use.

That said, customers’ reviews of the iPhone do seem to agree with the useability test results, with the phone’s ease of use being given a 9.6 rating overall, and with 3 out of 5 comments so far specifically mentioning ease of use as a positive aspect of the device.

Personally, I’m still holding out for that price drop/3G.

Earlier this week, a woman in Seoul, South Korea, received an unpleasant surprise when her Samsung laptop computer spontaneously combusted.

A Samsung Electronics Co. official confirmed the accident, saying that
it might be caused by overheating, because the laptop computer was used
for a long time on a pillow, which apparently blocked ventilation of
the machine.

"Since the woman used the computer on a pillow for
hours, it could block a ventilating hole below the model," said the
company official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

There’s been a spate of burning battery stories in the news over the last few years. Sony, Dell, Apple, LG and others have had to recall faulty batches of lithium ion batteries. There was even a report last month that a South Korean man was killed by an exploding mobile phone battery.

Here’s a great video showing what actually happens when a laptop’s lithium ion battery catches fire:

Luckily, catastrophic failure doesn’t actually happen all that often, when you consider just how many of these batteries are around the place: there must be a hundred or more lithium ion batteries in the Reevoo offices alone, and none of them have blown up so far — touch wood.

Still, you’d be hard pressed to find any manufacturer referring to their portable computer as a ‘laptop’ these days. Sure, we
the buying public call them laptops — we even use them on our laps —
but the makers are afraid of the liability of encouraging this
behaviour, selling ‘notebook’ or ‘portable’ computers instead.

It’s
perhaps not particularly surprising, given the high energy density of lithium ion cells and their tendency to burst, burn,
or even blow up when overheated. Blocking your computer’s air vents
with bedding is one way to make it overheat, as is placing it on a soft surface that restricts its ability to dissipate heat — trousered legs, for example.

Gentlemen have something else to worry about, too: using a computer on your lap may affect your fertility!

Pioneer are planning to stop making 42" plasma panels according to the Asahi newspaper in Japan.

Instead they will buy in those panels from another manufacturer, either Panasonic or Hitachi.

The move will allow the company, which lost money making flatscreens last year, to focus on larger screens, and parallels a move made last year to rebrand LCD screens from Sharp.

This probably isn’t great news for shoppers, given that their top ranked 42" plasma is a Pioneer.

Toshiba have been quick to move on from the death of HD-DVD, releasing a raft of new flatscreen panels over the past few days.

They have three new series coming out, the CV, XV and ZF series.

The CV series contains LCD panels at 32, 27 and 42" screen sizes, all with 768p resolution, 3 HDMI inputs, and off button, so you can switch the TV off completely without slipping a disk.

The XV series are also 32, 37 and 42" LCD screens, but this time with Full HD, 1080p resolutions. There probably isn’t that much point in a 32" Full HD panel, unless you like to sit very close to Corrie. Otherwise these are pretty similar to the CV series, so it will be interesting to see what the mark-up is when both come out in March.

Finally, coming in April are is the ZF range of 40", 46" and 52" LCD sets. These promise various bits of picture processing technology under the hood, and the ability to vary the the amount of light produced by the LCD backlight, so you can get those deep blacks during a late-night film, but still be able to watch the sport on a sunny afternoon. We’ll keep an eye on the price of that 52" LCD vs similar plasma offerings.

More details in the HDTVUK blog posts linked to for each series.

I was amazed to come across this piece of research recently, which completely passed me by when it was first published.

According to CACI, a ‘marketing and information group’, UK homes contain an average of 4.7 television sets. What?? Unless the average British household has an average of 3 old black and white TVs stuffed out of sight in the garage, this makes absolutely no sense to me.

A quick office straw poll revealed an average of 2.05 TVs per ‘living unit’. One person claimed 4 TVs, and only one person confessed to being over the national average with a shocking 5 sets.

The Daily Telegraph have worked out that for the 4.7 figure to be true, it would mean

at least one in the living room, one in the kitchen and one in each bedroom - in every home in the land.

They seem to have forgotten about the garage or the loft, even so, an average of 4.7 televisions per house continues to make very little sense. I just punched a few numbers together using the 2001 Census data, and worked out that if the 4.7 number is correct then we have an average of 1.7 televisions for every man, woman and child in the UK.

Is this you? How many televisions are you hoarding? How can this number be true?