Decide what to buy: the Reevoo.com blog

“Don’t buy really big plates - you have to be quite artistic to fit them in!” Kenwood KDW8ST2A

“I cant have surround sound as i am part deaf and it leaves me running aroud the room to find the main speaker!” Toshiba 32XV505D

“I’ve placed reliability as most important so only the years will tell. If we’re still together years from now it’ll have been a good marriage, at the moment we’re still on honeymoon.” Bosch WAE 24363

“The picture quality is not great, but it is plenty good enough for pictures being taken by a 3 year old, which usually has half your head missing anyway.” Tough Kids Digital Camera

“This is no exaggeration: The first night I wore these glasses out, I was invited to join a gentlemen’s club, asked to play rugby for a local team, and I went home with a beautiful young lady who claimed, the next day, to have only talked to me because of my glasses. These glasses = WIN.” Mai Tai Glasses

You’ve probably noticed a few shops on your high street, and indeed on the web, disappear in the last few months. But what happens if you’ve bought something that needs taking back or hasn’t been delivered? Find out what rights you have when a retailer goes into administration…

Refunds
If you want to return goods, after a retailer has gone into administration, you may hit a few problems. Previous returns policies will probably not apply so the best way to deal with the situation, whilst stores are still open, is to talk to staff to see if they will be able to refund or exchange the goods.

If they are unable to do this, your next port of call is with the administrators. Place a claim with them and send them all the receipts and other paperwork you have. Of course, you may still end up with nothing but you may be lucky and get at least some of your money back.

Undelivered or faulty goods
If you have placed and paid for an undelivered order, even if you’ve only paid a deposit, you have more rights but it does depend on how you’ve paid.

Funnily enough, these cases are always better when you pay by credit card. That doesn’t mean you should all go away and stack up debt on your credit cards! But, if you know that you’re able to pay the card back in full, they do offer a bit more security when things go wrong.

If you pay for something between £100 and £30,000 using your credit card for part or the whole purchase, you are protected by Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974. This states that he credit provider is “jointly and severally liable” for your purchase:

75. — (1) If the debtor under a debtor-creditor-supplier agreement falling within section 12(b) or (c) has, in relation to a transaction financed by the agreement, any claim against the supplier in respect of a misrepresentation or breach of contract, he shall have a like claim against the creditor, who, with the supplier, shall accordingly be jointly and severally liable to the debtor.

So they will be obliged to refund you if your goods are not delivered or if they arrive faulty.

If your purchase was under £100, you will not be protected and you will need to contact the administrators to make a claim instead.

If you’ve paid by debit card then you don’t have the same protection as you do with your credit card but you do have the option of the ChargeBack service - if you contact your bank within 120 days from the purchase date, they may be able to reclaim the cost of your purchase from the retailer’s bank and then charge this back to you. However, there is no guarantee that you will get your money back.

Another thing to think about is to make sure you’ve spent all your vouchers and any store credit you have remaining whilst the retailer is still trading.

On a positive note, when a retailer goes into administration, it’s usually a great time to pick up a bargain. They will try and sell off as much stock as possible so keep your eyes peeled for some price cuts. Just remember that once the retailer is gone for good, you may have a devil of a job taking it back if you don’t like it. Make sure you keep all the receipts, just in case you need to make a claim later and if you can, use your credit card, just in case the goods are faulty or undelivered.

Dick Tracy, eat your heart out. LG has come up with a futuristic treat from the past with the GD910 – a wrist watch phone. But if you thought it was going to be a second-rate mobile, it’s actually packed full of features you wouldn’t expect. There’s a pretty low-grade camera but its 3G HSDPA compatibility, 1.43” touchscreen, MP3 player and text to speech functionality makes it a decent phone and a pretty hot watch.

It also packs in bluetooth (so you can look even more spy-like with a headset), MMS and it’s water resistant. Want one? They’re due to be released in Europe later on this year.

Check it out in action:

Currently appearing in Coolest-Gadgets’ comp

Apple has just released their most recent set of earnings figures, detailing how the MP3 player, phone and computer manufacturer performed over the Christmas season. The answer? Strikingly well. In the middle of a global financial meltdown, Apple managed to turn in record breaking revenues ($10bn) and profits ($1.6bn).

Reevoo’s own figures back up Apple’s success story. Reevoo measured traffic to all Apple products across 61 British retailers’ websites, and saw Apple’s share of the market increase dramatically during the Christmas peak, from 1.3% in September to 3.0% in December.

This has everyone wondering whether Apple can continue to thrive selling high-end electronics while lesser manufacturers fight to survive in a race to the bottom of falling margins and lower sales. Of course, what’s driven Apple’s success over the past few years has been its continuing innovation - think of the iPhone, the iMac or the iPod Nano. So some pundits are asking whether this pace of innovation can continue or whether Apple will soon be running out of ideas.

A closer look at Reevoo’s numbers suggests that it might not be wise to bank on Apple performing as well in future. For one thing, the company’s market share has been pretty flat throughout the year, slipping back through the summer after popularity increased in the spring with the release of new iMac models.

This time around, it looks like Apple has gained most of its increase from the one area where it is truely king: MP3 players.

No-one needs to be told that by far the most popular range of MP3 players is Apple’s distinctive iPods, but amazingly Apple has managed to increase iPod popularity from 60% of MP3 players through the year to 80% during November and December, leaving all other manufacturers to share just 20% of the market over the Christmas peak. Apple released a highly-praised refresh of its bestselling Nano during September and a smaller update of the iPod Touch. Shoppers responded with a thumbs up, giving the new Nano a rating of 9.1 out of 10. But popularity only really rocketed in November, perhaps highlighting their appeal as Christmas gifts.

In addition to their overwhelming popularity, Apple also manage to sell iPods at a premium - only Portable Media Player specialist Archos has a higher average cost per MP3 player sold.

Putting this together suggests that Apple has benefited from a strong run on its impressive MP3 players this Christmas, putting it in position to report those eye-popping revenue revenue figures.

So why the caution? There are two worries about iPods for 2009.

The first is that other manufacturers are improving their products. Samsung and Creative, in particular, saw much-increased ratings from shoppers over Christmas. So if you’re looking for a new MP3 player, it would be a good idea to keep your eye on what these two brands have to offer.

The second worry is that the number of people looking for a new MP3 player seems certain to decrease as smartphones improve and start to reproduce more and more features of MP3 players. With only 4.4m iPhones sold in the last quarter compared to 23m iPods, Apple will have to do a lot of work to make sure iPod fans stick with the brand.

Well, it’s 2009 and there are a load of exciting phones due to be released this year. We thought we’d concentrate on three that you can get your hands on pretty soon:

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (formerly known as the Tube), will be the first Nokia touchscreen and is due for release on Friday.

It has a 3.2″ screen, 3.2 megapixel camera , full HTML access to the web, 8.8 hour talk time, weighs in at 109g but is still a little chubby at 15.5mm thick. As you’d expect, it’s built for music and you get an 8GB SD card (expandable up to 16GB) for all your tracks, photos and videos. It’s capable of 35 hour music playback  and 5.2 hour video playback and the video playback has been praised by the guys over at TechRadar who say it’s a “a viable alternative to an iPod touch”.

And if you hate grubby fingerprints all over your screens, Nokia has provided a stylus and the more trendy plectrum for all your pointing pleasure.

Texting is even more fun with a normal keyboard, full QWERTY keyboard, mini QWERTY or handwriting recognition.

You can also pick your top four contacts to follow/stalk on your home screen by getting RSS feeds on their social network activity, all your conversations and photos.

Get down to the Nokia Store on Regent Street on Friday for some extra freebees, including Guitar Rock Tour and Benicassim tickets.

Sim-free handsets will be £249 but look for the deals on various networks. For more info, check out the Nokia website.

Palm Pre

You’ve probably heard that the folks over at Palm HQ have been busy bees trying to bring themselves back into the smartphone game. Their offering, the Palm Pre, is also coming soon.

It’s been dubbed as an iPhone-G1-INQ1 fusion which impresses with its 3.1″ touchscreen, 320×480 resolution HVGA display, 3MP camera, Wi-Fi, 3G, GPS and 8GB storage. But where it really blows the socks off established stars like the iPhone, is with its multiple application viewing. Each app just sits like a deck of cards on the screen so that you can scroll between them and not have to lose things you’re working on to view something else.

It’s curved glass screen adds style and other nice touches are the hidden, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 360 degree accelerometer and all your contact with your friends and family can be viewed, chat-style.

You can pretty much sync-up your life with this phone with everything from Google, Outlook and Facebook.

We also like the look of its stylish charging dock, the Palm Touchstone. Just place the Pre onto the Touchstone and magnets “quickly align your phone in the correct position for charging”.

The Pre will be out later this year but check out this video for more info on how it’ll work:

Nokia N97

We can also look forward to the Nokia N97. Complete with 3.5″ touchscreen, 5MP camera (with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens) and flash, a huge 32GB of storage with an extra 16GB via the Micro SD slot, GPS with built-in compass and Wi-Fi, will make it a pretty hard-hitting release.

And if you get fed up of having to keep charging up your phone, the N97 has 400 hours of standby time! Along with 37 hours of music and 4.5 hours of video playback.

Add to that a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, fully customisable home screen, Symbian S60 software, N-Gage games and all the syncing you expect from Nokia and you’ve got an impressive piece of kit.

According to Play.com, the N97 will be available at the end of March for £479.99.

Happy 2009!

Hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and New Year.

Let’s kick off 2009 with a time and space saving gadget. There have been lots of rumours about the Powermat but at this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics Association), we’ve finally heard that they will be in stores this year.

What are they? They’re mats that can be plugged in and will simultaneously charge a whole heap of gadgets, all at the same time, wirelessly.

That’s no more chargers cluttering up your house, no more tangled wires and no need to use multiple plugs when you need to charge up more than one thing at the same time.

The Powermat uses magnetic induction and, according to the website, “When a Powermat-enabled device is placed on the mat, a “handshake” process synchronizes the mat with the receiver and electric power is generated to meet the specific energy needs of the device.”They’ll then monitor the power in the device and disconnect power to each device once they’ve finished charging.

Powermats will also be able to be used in cars with their universal, window mount car charger for hand-held devices.

At the moment, you can use the Powermat with mobile phones, laptops, iPods, digital cameras, handheld games consoles and sat navs.

Pretty exciting stuff but we still have no word on prices. So we’ll wait and see about the price tags on these things before we go ahead and liberate our chargers.

For more info, check out the website.