Decide what to buy: the Reevoo.com blog

Heading to a festival this year? Even if you’re not, the Orange Power Pump can be used for all manner of outdoor parties. It’s a foot pump that powers a tiny generator that will in-turn, charge all your gadgets. No electricity required and with a minute or so on the pump, you’ll have enough charge for a 5 minute call. All that and you’re helping out the environment too.

Watch this space for a price and release date but no doubt it will be available in time for all this summer’s festivals, just head towards the Orange stand.

[Orange]

Currently appearing in [Coolest Gadgets]

Meet the Chairman. We’re talking VIP but Very Important Phone as opposed to Person, because the Chairman is a new phone with a difference.

The clue is in its maker - Ulysse Nardin, watch maker extraordinaire. This phone takes top-of-the-range watch technology and teams it up with a touchscreen giving us a stylish hybrid handset. Its built-in battery is charged by the kinetic energy generated by the moving rotor so that your phone charges without you even noticing, while it’s working.

But if you thought this was a gimmick phone, think again. Ulysse Nardin have created an interesting multi-touch smartphone. Complete with Wi-Fi, 5 megapixel camera and 2.8 inch screen, the Chairman certainly sounds like a phone to look out for. Release dates and price are currently under wraps but we’ll keep you posted.

[Ulysse Nardin]

Featured in the Coolest Gadgets competition.

All week we’ve been running Reevoo’s first ever giveaway. We’ve got one model of the extremely hard to get hold off Tesco Hifi - voted ‘Britain’s Best Hifi‘ in the recent Reevoo Customer Choice Awards.

We’ve had lots of great entries on Twitter, but we reckon the prize should go to the person who went the extra mile and sent us a picture to show us why he needed a hifi so badly.

@reevoo I need to #winahifi because I’m a poor student currently stuck with this tiny little speaker — jamesctaylor

Well James, we’re happy to be able to help out a poor student, with - brace yourself - Britain’s best-rated hifi!

And if that wasn’t enough, we’re also going to throw in a copy of the White Lies album, To Lose My Life.

James, if you let us have your address we’ll send through the hifi, and you can look forward to having to make some room on your bookshelves for this:

Look out for more Reevoo giveaways coming soon!

Following on from the introductory post last week, we’re taking a look at the various web-enabled TV technologies offered by the big manufacturers.

Today, we’re looking at the manufacturer who’s got the first web TV system on the market: Sony, with its ‘Applicast’ system.

Applicast is currently available on UK models on the W5500, E5500 and V5500 series.

So what does Applicast offer?

According to Sony, Applicast offers a fairly uninspiring collection of basic computer programs: ‘an analogue style clock’, calendar, alarm, calculator, and world clock.

Fortunately for web-savvy shoppers, Sony has packed a key feature into the Applicast system - an RSS reader. This will allow you to “Get up-to-the-minute news from your favourite websites right on your TV screen. With more than 100,000 RSS feeds available worldwide, you can tune in to any hot topic without tuning out of the TV show you’re enjoying.”

The short version seems to be that you’ll be able to get Decide What to Buy on your TV! There are lots of other potential uses: as well as blogs, you could get news, weather info, stock markets, Twitter, etc.

As you can see from the picture below, the Applicast system presents the content in a pretty classy manner, but you won’t be able to read much on the RSS widget!





Overall, the Applicast system has some potential, but plenty of room for improvement. Still, at least the Applicast system is available on TVs that are on sale now, unlike many of the web TV offerings we’ll be covering!

Reevoo’s First Giveaway

Hours after Reevoo announced that the Tesco Value MC-907 Hi-Fi had trounced the opposition in the first Reevoo Customer Awards the machine was sold out across the Country!

In an effort to prevent enormous public outcry Reevoo are giving away one copy of the glimmering gold champion of music lovers’ eardrums!

There’s a catch though. Not just anyone is worthy of the public’s favourite Hi-Fi, you’ll have to prove it truly deserves pride of place on your mantlepiece this summer, and you’re going to have to think creatively if you want to win.

At Reevoo we want the last remaining model to go to the most deserving person out there so show us how much you need the thumping bass in your life by sending us your finest picture, poem or paragraph showing and explaining why you’re truly worthy of Britain’s greatest Hi-Fi. We expect to see air guitar pictures, romantic song lyrics and at least one person brave enough to dress up like someone from The Archers.

A Hi-Fi is nothing without music so we’re giving away the new White Lies album To Lose My Life too.

How to Enter

Being big fans of all things internet we would like to invite you to use your favourite blog site or Twitter to communicate your passion for this mighty prize to us!
Just answer this simple question:

‘Why do you or someone you know deserve to win a new Hi-Fi?’

Blog entries

If you blog your entry make sure you link directly to this post at http://www.reevoo.com/decidewhattobuy/2009/05/win-britains-favourite-hi-fi

and feel free to use images to accompany your post.

Twitter

If you use Twitter begin your tweet with

@reevoo I need to #winahifi because…

By doing this we can keep track of all entrants. You can also search Twitter for #winahifi and see how you compare to the competition!

If you want to add an image to show how much you need the Hi-Fi you can use the popular Twitter image uploading service, Twitpic.

What if I’ve never used a blog or Twitter?

If you’ve never blogged or used Twitter before don’t worry, it’s easy! Simply visit Blogger to get started blogging or Twitter to start writing your own Tweets.

Closing Date

The closing date for the competition is 3pm 15/05/09. Be sure to check back on Decide What To Buy the following day to find out if you’re the lucky winner.

Please follow this link for full Terms and Conditions.

People have been talking about all the technology in your house communicating with each other for years but Microsoft’s taken the bull by the horns and done something simple about it.

They’ve teamed up with Californian company Fugoo to create a Windows-based platform which can be plugged into a whole heap of gadgets so that they can all talk to each other. And the result? An alarm clock which can talk to your coffee machine and tell it you’ve woken up and to start brewing your coffee, not only that, it can remind you of your first appointment and calculate how long it will take you to drive to work based on current traffic conditions. Your digital photo frame will also be able to sync up with your PC and display your favourite photos, stocks and shares info or the latest news as you slurp that freshly made coffee. The possibilities are endless. Pretty nifty, hey?

So what does it all cost? The system will be released in the US in June and will set you back a cool $99. The rest of the world will have to wait until 2010.

The guys behind the technology are already working on future uses for the gadget, envisaging “a refrigerator that can generate a weekly shopping list based on staples that have been used up, and then place a delivery order at a local supermarket’s web site. Or a lawn sprinkler that checks the weather forecast for the possibility of rain before turning itself on”. Watch this space!

[Fugoo]

If you’ve been following the world of TVs this year, you’ll have seen that one of the big trends that has people excited at the moment is the serious attempts manufacturers are making to bring web content to our TV screens. It’s often been predicted, but now it finally seems to be happening: the TV and computer are coming together.

So what is ‘web-enabled TV’ - nobody has been able to agree on a standard name yet - and why should I care?

Web-enabled TV is the ability to get some web content available directly through your TV, which is hooked up to an internet connection. As is often the case with new technologies, the kind and amount of content varies widely, from feeds from from sites like Flickr to weather reports, and potentially YouTube.

Web-enabled TVs should be of interest if you like the idea of checking your email or Facebook from your sofa without having to crouch over the PC at the desk, or if you simply like being on the cutting edge of media consumption: YouTube access in particular, could mark a real change in the content we watch on TV.

Web-enabled TV is an emerging technology, with web-enabled sets just beginning to appear. Over the next week or so, I’ll be blogging about the different technologies available from the key manufacturers, including Samsung with their Internet@TV system, Sony with Applicast, and Panasonic with VieraCast.

We’ll take a close look at the current features of each web TV system, and we’ll also try to predict where each system might end up in a few months time. We should end up with a pretty comprehensive guide to the best of the web TV experience. I hope you’ll be able to join us.