Decide what to buy | the Reevoo.com blog, featuring news on TVs, cameras, laptops, mp3 players & other gadgets, shopping tips and deals, reviews and more

Lost again this bank holiday!  Going to find my way home with this TomTom XL Sat Nav , £100 with free delivery at Amazon Electricals - a 23% off deal!

**Update - now cheaper!!** Going to take some good pics at the carnival this weekend with this bargain Samsung ES-55 digital camera, down to £69 at Pixmania - £11 less than the next price! **Update** This just got cheaper with the CDiscount voucher code!  Now £64 + £2 delivery!  Copy and paste the code 20CAMERA into the field “Voucher code” on CDiscount’s checkout page and get 20% off.   This voucher is valid until Mon 31 August 2009- happy snapping!

The bank holiday weekend’s nearly here; it must be time for us to share the reviews that have been making us smile this week at Reevoo Towers.

“I don’t like what it keeps telling me!!!!!!!” Tesco body fat analyser glass scale


“I took the precaution of marrying someone who can make furniture but most people would have been tearing their hair out.” Honduras Dressing Table & Stool


“Defintely can’t multi task with this phone as it needs your full attention, so no more driving and texting - The police will be happy!” Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic


“Bad Points: It does not get up and make tea….ever!” Lexmark No. 4XL & 5X Ink Cartridges


“perfect for my other half who doesnt have alot of room in his kitchen, yes ladies, even a man can use it.” Tefal Toast ‘n’ Egg TT55001

Need to cool down!  Got this great Fridgemaster MTRL109A, for £110 with free delivery from 24 Electric  -£38 cheaper than next best price!

Flip video bargain!  We’re off to make some Reevoo films with this cool gadget - and with 18% off RRP - down to £90 + £2 delivery at CDiscount.

The iPod in all its various forms is the indisputable king of the portable media player market: more than 200 million have been sold since they first launched in 2001, and it’s estimated that over 70% of the mp3 players sold in the USA are iPods.  (Source: The Guardian Technology blog 1 & 2)

But the tide might be beginning to turn: for the very first time Apple has seen a fall in iPod sales.  There are certainly plenty of competitors for the iPod’s crown, many of them offering features not available on Apple’s player.  Let’s take a look at the 5 coolest features on offer.

1. Radio
It may sound prosaic, but having a radio in your player opens up a whole new range of listening possibilities, whether it’s following the progress of the cricket or discovering new music from your favourite DJ.  FM radio MP3 players have long been common outside the Apple fold, but now you can also get mp3 players with DAB radio for a better quality radio signal.



2. Waterproof
Work-out music doesn’t have to be just for dry land.  Aquatic expert Speedo makes the sturdy 1GB Aquabeat player, while New Universe makes the Dolphin Touch, a tiny waterproof mp3 player with a touchscreen, 4GB storage and FM radio.

3. Sonic search
Sony’s iPod Shuffle competitor, the NWZ-W202, boasts ‘Zappin’ technology that allows you to to search through the songs on your device by listening to the first few seconds of the chorus.  If that isn’t enough to sway you, the design of the NWZ-W202 is pretty nifty too.  Sony have miniaturised the workings of the player enough so that the whole device is incorporated into the headphones.

4. Wind-up battery
Not just for the eco-conscious, the Revolution Eco media player means you’ll never be stuck with a dead battery and no music.  One minute of winding gives you enough power for 45 minutes of music - and the generator can also act as an emergency mobile charger. The Eco also plays videos and FM radio and can record radio for later listening.

5. Dancing light-show
Perhaps not the most useful feature, but certainly a lot of fun.  The Sony Rolly twists, moves and flashes different coloured lights in time to the beat of the music playing out of its in-built speakers.  If nothing else, it’s inspired a massive (and often very funny) YouTube following.

And if none of these features grab you, be assured that more conventional PMPs are catching Apple up in offering iPod-style features.  The Sonix 7 incorporates an ebook reader,  the Sony S series walkmen and E series walkmen let you watch downloaded iPlayer content, and the premium Archos media tablet range do pretty much everything the iPod Touch can.

And what does the future hold? The Sun has one suggestion: mp3 players embedded in breast implants.

Need some funky USB speakers, and got these Gear4 Blackbox Minis, down to £18 with FREE delivery from Play.com, that’s an amazing 64% off RRP!  Great to take away camping this bank holiday weekend.

When buying a new computer, whether it be a laptop or desktop, there are a lot of numbers to consider: how much memory it has to run software, how much storage space it has for your files and even how much room it’ll take up on your desk. One that’s only become something to consider in the last few years is how many cores the processor has.

The processor sits at the heart of your computer and does all the number-crunching that makes everything else possible, from writing a letter to listening to music; it used be the case that you just needed to pay attention to how fast it was: how many gigahertz (or going back further, megahertz) did it run at?

Whilst it may have looked like your computer was doing lots of different things at once (loading a web page & playing a music file), with a single core it was actually doing things one at a time, switching rapidly back and forth between different tasks to provide a (hopefully) seamless experience of each thing you needed it to do. If you wanted to do more things more quickly you needed to increase the speed of the processor.

Multi-core processors provide a different way to speed things up. Instead of making one processor core work faster, you split the work between 2 or more. You could think of it like the old school maths problem: if it takes 1 painter 1 hour to paint 1 wall, how long will it take 2 painters to paint the same wall?

Unfortunately, this doesn’t automatically mean that a dual-core 2GHz processor will run at 4GHz. Software has to be written in a special way to enable it to split the work up and make the most of multiple cores; if you want your wall painted twice as fast, you have to make sure that both painters are going to turn up and know the most efficient way to divide up the wall between them! The good news is that as multi-core processors have become so common, more and more software is being designed to take advantage of them, so your computer can paint more walls, more quickly!

Now we’ve found these amazing deals for TVs, we need something to put them on!  Found this quality Alphason AD351LCD for only £50 with FREE delivery from Go-Electrical - that’s an amazing £45 less than the next price!

Take a quality photo this Sunday with this outstanding deal on a Fujifilm FinePix S2000HD, £165 at Pixmania, that’s 25% off, and with a 2 year warranty!