Decide what to buy: the Reevoo.com blog

Today we’re continuing our guide to understanding TV model names. At first glance, TV product names are generally pretty complicated, unmemorable and unpronouncable combinations of letters and numbers. To the uninitiated this doesn’t help when you’re trying to find your way around the large television market.

However, closer inspection does often reveal some logic behind the names manufacturers give to their latest gift to the world. Today I’m going to walk through Sony’s naming conventions.

Our example product is the Sony Bravia KDL-32V4000.

Sony gives the KDL letters to all its LCD TVs. Sony makes no plasma TVs, and makes one cutting-edge OLED TV, the XEL-1.

The first two numbers refer to the screen size in inches.

The next letters indicate the series. Sony has a large number of different series. I’ve collected all the current series below, along with descriptions about each series series from Sony and the range of screen sizes the series is available in.

The final numbers refer to smaller variations within a series - so do check the detailed specifications!

You can browse Sony TVs on Reevoo.

Heard about all the 3D TVs ready to rock our world? Well gear yourself up for a new range of 3D appliances – the Panasonic 3D washing machines. Oh yes. Viewing goggles not included. But before you think we’re all going to be sitting watching movies on our washers, it’s not that exciting.

Panasonic have recognised the need for our washing machines to handle their loads in a different way. They say that the machines of today will spin your washing and as a result, it will all stick to the sides of the drum, meaning that your clothes suffer from an inefficient wash. But with this 3D jiggery pokery, it will sense the weight of your load, how fast and hard it falls from the top of the drum to the bottom and then use just the right amount of spin to make sure all your threads get a good dosing of soap on all sides.

And if that wasn’t enough, they’re also super green. One of the machines, the NA-16VX1, operates to the prestigious EU A-20% energy efficiency standard and so uses 20% less energy than an ordinary A-category washer. All of the washers have shorter washes and use less water than the average machine too.

The tilted drum contributes to the water saving and the spin sense magic helps save energy by reducing unnecessary spin.

If you’re loving the concept, check out the Panasonic website for more details. If you’re looking for a more conventional machine, check out the washing machine reviews before you buy.

via Electricpig

The GSMA Mobile World Congress took place last week and no doubt you’ve been hearing all about innovative mobile handsets ever since. Here’s a round-up of some of the best phones at MWC.

Sony Ericsson Idou

The Sony Ericsson Idou will seriously impress with its camera when it eventually goes on sale. It will be the World’s first 12 megapixel camera phone! Pretty impressive.

The Idou also packs in quality music and video playback in this sleek handset. It will be available towards the second half of this year with a shiny new name. We’ll keep you posted.

HTC Magic

The HTC Magic is the follow-up to the G1 and the second handset powered by Google’s Android interface. However, this time the handset will be exclusively available through Vodafone, rather than T-Mobile. It comes equipped with a 3.2 megapixel camera, MP3 player, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and trackball. It’s 3.2” QVGA touchscreen is home to an on-screen keyboard so, unlike the G1, there’s no slide-out QWERTY keyboard, making it a lot slimmer.

Check out this video for a 360 view:

(more…)

As the pressure to create a phone as popular as the iPhone continues, manufacturers are just getting it wrong when it comes to touchscreens.

There are a multitude of touchscreen mobiles out there but only a few are actually pushing the right buttons with consumers. We looked into 19,000 reviews for 226 phones in the last 12 months to find out how they’d been rated by shoppers. In the bottom 10, a whopping 50% were touchscreens.

In contrast, only 2 of the top ten were touchscreen models. The top-rated phone with a score of 8.8 out of ten is the Nokia 5220 XpressMusic with a conventional key pad. Apple’s iPhone is the highest scoring touchscreen phone with a score of 8.3 out of ten.

Here’s a look at the top 10 mobiles, launched in the last 12 months, as rated by consumers

1.      Nokia 5220 XpressMusic

2.      Nokia E71

3.      Sony Ericsson W595

4.      Nokia 2680

5.      Nokia 3110 Classic

6.      Samsung M150

7.      Apple iPhone 3G 16GB - touchscreen

8.      LG KC910 Renoir - touchscreen

9.      Nokia 6600 Slide

10.    Nokia 3600

And the bottom 10

1.        HTC Touch Diamond - touchscreen

2.        Sony Ericsson T303

3.        Samsung Armani - touchscreen

4.        Sony Ericsson C702

5.        Nokia 6124 Classic

6.        BlackBerry Storm 9500 - touchscreen

7.        Samsung i900 Omnia - touchscreen

8.        Nokia N96

9.        Samsung U600

10.      Samsung F490 - touchscreen

And here’s what some reviewers are saying about touchscreens:

“Touchscreen is a little hard to use if your fingers are not slender and pointy.”

“The ‘virtual’ keyboards are rubbish, takes ages to type anything…you could always employ a five year old with small fingers. They should have used a stylus.”

“Jerky software, not fluid. Crashes often.”

“If you have nails can be a bit tricky on the keypad as it is heat sensitive and so must be pressed with the finger tip as a nail will not make it work.”

“I found the touchscreen hard work and the physical ‘pressing’ was made more difficult by the fact that your finger, however slim or fat, tends to ’spread’ when you have to press.”

So if any manufacturers are listening, take a look at some of the touchscreen reviews and address the issues shoppers have with current models.

We like people’s comments and opinions at Reevoo and we have our own as well!
Why not add us on Twitter to see what we’re chatting about in the office today?

Our Tweeting will offer you insight into how we work and the technologies and trends we’re following most keenly. Of course if we spot a new bargain on Reevoo we’ll be shouting about it on Twitter for you all to hear!

To add us on Twitter just click the links on the right hand side of Decide What To Buy, under the Twitter logo.
I’ll (jonnyapps) be talking mainly about Digital Cameras and computing, Jo (the_chipstick) is full of exciting mobile phone tweets just waiting to burst out and Sam (Sambos) is the man to follow for interesting updates about anything that provides home entertainment in your living room.

If you’ve not used Twitter before you can sign up to it here.
Think of Twitter as being a lot like a text message or a Facebook status update. You can ‘tweet’ your thoughts and interesting links and talk about whatever you wish.

You can visit Twitter directly here: www.twitter.com
Mobile devices such as the iPhone and the Blackberry 8900 Curve can be used to tweet on the go.

After some great feedback on our Reevoo iPhone app from Graham Charlton at ecounsultancy we jumped at the chance to act on some suggested improvements.

After a few hours of work we’re pleased to say that the Reevoo iPhone app now allows you to compare prices between various retailers!

So now, when you’re out on that spending spree, not only will your shopping choice be empowered by thousands of customer reviews at the touch of a button, you will also be able to see which stores stock the product and at what price!

As well as being able to compare retailers we made even further improvements.
After you’ve read reviews and seen the various retailer prices you can now choose to surf to the retailer store directly on your iPhone.

You can also choose to email yourself, or anyone else, a link of the Reevoo product page you are viewing. This way, if you’re browsing on the bus or wandering through a store, and want to take a bit more time before committing to a purchase, you can send yourself a reminder.

Installing the iPhone App
To add the updated Reevoo iPhone app to your home screen just unlock your iPhone and:

1. Open Safari
2. Navigate to http://www.reevoo.com/iphone
3. Tap the + button in Safari and choose ‘Add to Home Screen’

What’s left to do?
You’re probably now wondering if it could get any better, and we’re confident that it can, with your help.
We love customer reviews, so why not tell us what you think of our iPhone app. Give us good points and bad and one suggestion for an improvement you’d most like to see implemented. We’ll collect your opinions and implement the best idea.
Leave your review in the comments section of this post or email any of the category managers with your ideas to feedback@reevoo.com

There’s a new dual screen laptop on the block and it comes courtesy of gScreen Corp. The two screens on the G400 are of equal size – both 15.4 inch backlit LEDs, so you can work seamlessly on a very spacious canvass. The G400 also comes with up to 8 GB of RAM, up to 500GB hard drive, 6 USB 2.0 ports, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz T9600 or P8400 2.26-GHz and the Quadro FX 2700M or GeForce 9800M GT from Nvidia.

Not too shabby. Of course, the double vision does mean that it’s a bit on the heavy side. The G400 weighs in at 3.49kg and is due to be released on 25th February. No word on price yet but we’ll keep you posted.

Laptops can be tricky things to purchase. If you want a larger hard drive or more RAM, how much more should you pay? Do you go for well established brands or cheaper newcomers?

Read on to find out what happened when we analysed 900 laptops to answer:
1. How much does a large screen cost vs. a small screen?
2. How much does an extra 100GB of hard drive space or an extra 1000MB (1GB) of RAM cost?
3. Who really makes the best laptops?
4. Should I buy a new model or buy an older model for a cheaper price?

1. How much does a large screen cost vs. a small screen?
Strangely, the size of screen has very little to do with the price of a laptop. Check out the graph below which shows that 17” screens can vary from £235 to £2000! And quite often, 13” and 15” models are the same price as the larger 17” models.

So, when you come to choose a laptop, chose a size that’s right for you. If you want to be able to take it with you wherever you go, go for something that’s small and light but if you will be using your laptop for design work or to watch DVDs, then go for a larger screen size.

Click image to enlarge

2. How much does an extra 100GB of hard drive space cost, or an extra 100MB (1GB) of RAM cost?
It’s quite difficult to split out different features to determine how much they each add on to the price but – and here comes the science – by doing a regression across all the different laptops we know, using the price as the dependent variable and all key factors influencing price as the independent variables, we picked out the coefficient of the size of the hard drive and number of MB RAM to come up with the following:

• An extra 100GB of hard drive space typically costs around £100
• An extra 1000MB (1GB) of RAM costs £70
This isn’t always the case but we’ve noticed that it’s a general trend, using the methodology above.

Take a look at the table below which shows how brands like Sony and Toshiba pack in larger hard drives or more RAM and alter their prices accordingly.

Click image to enlarge

3. When I buy a Sony am I just paying for the brand or are they really better? Who really makes the best laptops?
Different brands excel at different things and focus on different parts of the market so it’s quite difficult to tell which brand is best overall. But we’ve looked at a few factors to help you out:

Customer score vs. price
We’ve looked at the correlation between the average selling price for each brand and their customer score to see if those which impress on performance charge more for their products.
This throws up some interesting results:

Click image to enlarge

As you can see there is some degree of positive correlation between average selling price and average score by brand. So as a broad brush statement, we could say:
Brands that are more expensive tend to get more highly rated by consumers

More importantly however, there are some brands that have significantly higher average scores than others. Namely,
• Asus may not be as well known as some of their illustrious competitors, but their low end products (average selling price of c.£300) are consistently highly rated
• Dell are the next best key manufacturer with a strong mid-range offer
• Sony laptops are also highly rated but at a price! People are prepared to pay more to own a Sony but they seem to perform well and impress consumers.

Brands and features
Different types of laptops suit different types of people, so we’ve looked at how brands perform in a number of key features and picked out the top performers in each feature. We’ve also included the average score across the feature so that you can see how well the top-scoring brand did:

Click image to enlarge

As you can see there is some degree of positive correlation between average selling price and average score by brand. So as a broad brush statement, we could say:
Brands that are more expensive tend to get more highly rated by consumers

More importantly however, there are some brands that have significantly higher average scores than others. Namely,
• Asus may not be as well known as some of their illustrious competitors, but their low end products (average selling price of c.£300) are consistently highly rated
• Dell are the next best key manufacturer with a strong mid-range offer
• Sony laptops are also highly rated, but at a price! People are prepared to pay more to own a Sony but they seem to perform well and impress consumers.

Brands and features
Different types of laptops suit different types of people, so we’ve looked at how brands perform in a number of key features and picked out the top performers in each feature. We’ve also included the average score across the feature so that you can see how well the top-scoring brand did:

• Asus do well to outperform the others in battery life, size and weight and overall rating
• Dell win the award for the best designed laptops
• Sony do best in the performance category and;
• Acer get the prize for the best value for money

4. Should I buy a new model or buy an older model for a cheaper price?
Some shoppers can’t resist getting the latest gadget or gizmo but how much could they save if they waited a few weeks?

Prices for most products will vary according to different retailers and different special offers at launch whereas others will keep their price for years on end – games consoles tend to follow this trend as manufacturers make the real money on games and accessories.

We’ve analysed price trend in thousands of electricals to give you an idea of what a typical price decay curve looks like:

Click image to enlarge

As you can see it doesn’t take long for retailers to start knocking the price of new products! Laptops follow a pretty similar path to other electricals, we’ve included TVs and digital cameras here and as you can see:
• if you buy a laptop around 3 months after it has launched, it will be around 20% cheaper than the launch price
• For most laptop purchases, that’s a saving of nearly £100!

However, after 4 months, prices flatten out so that anything older than 4 months will not save you any more money. You will just end up buying a machine that may have been built using older technology, and is more likely to be replaced with a newer version soon (which impacts resell value, but more importantly will probably leave you pretty annoyed)

So there are all the facts. Hopefully you’ll know what to look out for when you go to buy a laptop but if you’re still having problems, drop us an email at feedback@reevoo.com.

(All data based on H2 2008 figures)

Grim news today for home cinema fans, as the credit crunch really begins to show its teeth in the AV world. Pioneer, who make the highly-regarded Kuro range of premium TVs, will cease production this time next year in order to focus on in-car entertainment and less competitive home entertainment areas - like DJ kit.

Pioneer will also cut 30% of its workforce - a cool 10,000 jobs - and reduce its manufacturing capacity by 30%. Today’s news comes after Pioneer posted a £1bn expected loss for the year’s operations.

Until last year Pioneer focused exclusively on high quality plasma TVs, which were renouned for their deep black levels. The warning signs came in 2008, when Pioneer stopped making the plasma panels it was so well known for, instead using Panasonic panels, and releasing a new range of LCD TVs.

Pioneer remained a premium brand however. In 2008, Reevoo found that Pioneer was the most expensive TV manufacturer, with an average cost per TV of £1,258. That put the Kuro experience out of range of most TV shoppers, and may have put paid to Pioneer’s TV business.

As I said on Pioneer’s blog, this looks like an instance where the credit cruch has cut both ways. In the notoriously competive television market, the credit crunch has made it harder for Pioneer to manufacture their TVs at relatively small volumes, and it’s made it harder for shoppers to justify the Pioneer premium.

I’m sure there will be more details emerging over the next few days, but for now the message for shoppers is that 2009 could be your last chance to get your hands on a Pioneer TV, such as the Pioneer 5090 or a classic Pioneer Kuro PDP4280XD.

See Reevoo to buy, or just gaze at, the other Pioneer Kuros.

NB - this guide has been updated.  See the updated Panasonic TV model numbers post.

Today we’re continuing our guide to understanding TV model names. At first glance, TV product names are generally pretty complicated, unmemorable and unpronouncable combinations of letters and numbers. To the uninitiated this doesn’t help when you’re trying to find your way around the large television market.

However, closer inspection does often reveal some logic behind the names manufacturers give to their latest gift to the world. Today I’m going to walk through Panasonic’s naming conventions.

The first letters tell you a little about the type of screen:

- TH for plasma
- TX for LCD

The first two numbers refer to the screen size in inches.

The next letters and numbers are the series:

- P series are always plamsas
- L series are always LCDs
- A Z means the TV is Full HD
- An X means the TV is HD Ready, but not Full HD

Panasonic currently has the following series:

Panasonic Full HD LCD TVs:

- LZD800 (37″)
- LZD81 (32″, 37″)
- LZD85 (32″, 37″)
- LZD80 (32″, 37″)

Panasonic HD Ready LCD TVs:

- LXD85 (32″)
- LXD80 (26″, 32″)
- LXD8 (19″, 26″, 32″)

Panasonic Full HD plasma TVs:

- PZ800 (42″, 50″, 58″, 65″)
- PZ81 (42″, 46″, 50″)
- PZ85 (42″, 46″)
- PZ80 (42″, 46″)
- PZ8 (42″, 46″)

Panasonic HD Ready plasma TVs:

- PX80 (37″, 42″)
- PX8 (37″, 42″, 50″)

You can find out more about each series in Panasonic’s brochure (10mb pdf)

Finally, the B that’s sometimes included in the product name stands for region B – the UK.