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

The only problem with buying yourself a great new gadget, or fitting out your kitchen with up-to-the minute appliances is what to do with the things they replace. Disposing of old electricals can be a bit of a headache and they often end up gathering dust at the back of a cupboard or in the attic.

At the moment, over 75% of old electricals end up in landfills, polluting the soil. Every year Britain produces enough electrical waste to fill Wembley Stadium 6 times over. And this mountain of junk is growing - Britain produces 5% more electrical waste every year.

The irony is that over 85% of the materials that make up electrical goods are recyclable, and recycling them has never been easier. Here’s our quick guide to the right way to get rid of old TVs, kitchen appliances, gadgets and mobile phones.

What can I recycle?

If your product has a plug or a battery it can probably be recycled.  Double check by looking for the crossed-out wheely bin symbol somewhere on the product case or manual.

(more…)

Off to a festival in the next few months? Take a look at our festival survival gadgets to make sure you avoid all the usual festival pitfalls.

Don’t lose your tent or your friends this year, use Google Maps with Latitude to keep track of both. Go for the popular Nokia N97 or the new Apple iPhone 3G S and, while you’re at it, download the Shazam app which will recognise a tune within a few notes and then helpfully take you to iTunes to purchase the track.

Grab yourself a wind-up charger too, to make sure your mobile never runs out.

If you’re after a festival-proof camera, the Olympus MJU 1050 is tough, waterproof and shockproof so it should last the summer. It’s 12x digital zoom and 30fps video capture mode will keep your festival memories for ever. Owners love this camera and it receives a score of 8.6/10 with one reviewer labelling it “virtually indestructible”.

Going to the loo is a mission at festivals but there’s no need to miss out on all the action while you’re in the queue. This Roberts Solar DAB radio is, as the name suggests, solar powered, so running out of batteries is not an option. It’s rated 8.9/10 by very impressed owners.

After the artists have finished, the music doesn’t have to stop with the Sony NWZ-A816 Walkman which scooped gold in the Reevoo Customer Choice Awards earlier this year and scores 9.3/10. But if you want to share your music, go for the iMode Boombox dock which is rugged and a steal at only £25.

If you have to queue for the loo, at least avoid queuing for the shower. Take the Super Solar Shower in a bag and have a leisurely soak under a branch at your convenience. It can be refilled time and time again and the solar panel will heat the water. An absolute bargain at just £5!

Finally, a festival kit bag wouldn’t be complete without a wind-up head torch. £15 will get you the Uni-Com wind up head torch – hours of fun without running out of batteries.

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.

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.

Following on from our Christmas present guides, we’ve decided to focus on a popular gift - mobile phones. There are so many on the market these days that it can be a nightmare to read up on each one. But don’t worry, we’ve done it all for you.

We’ve read all the reviews for over 200 mobiles and picked out the most popular - the ones people are looking at in the run-up to Christmas, and the most highly rated phones of 2008 - focusing on what people think after they have bought and tried out their phones. We’ve also got our recommendation for the best value for money mobile.

So, I bet a lot of you will be thinking that the iPhone must be a key player in this year’s favourite mobiles but surprisingly, it’s not in the top 10. Problems with application crashes and battery life meant that people rated this year’s 3G iPhone lower than you might have expected. It gets a score of 8.2/10 which is even beaten by its predecessor, the original iPhone, which scores 8.3/10.

The UK’s favourite phone of 2008 is actually the BlackBerry Bold 9000. Here’s what some reviewers had to say:

+ Great keyboard for e-mailing and texting. Cracking screen which is nice and bright and videos look lovely on it. The sound from the internal speaker is really good. Just a great phone overall.

- Out of the box battery life is bad but gets better with regular charges.

+ The Bold is undoubtedly the most impressive Blackberry yet. One of its greatest advantages is that in spite of many new features, it feels very familiar. Web browsing is almost broadband speed.

But what about the most popular phone? The phone that everyone’s looking at in the run-up to Christmas this year is the Nokia N96. But although it’s created a lot of hype, it actually gets marked down by reviewers for poor battery life and software problems. It’s also a little expensive at around £500 for Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) customers, but it does do the business with its design and features. One reviewer writes “great picture and video quality, very easy to find your way around, fantastic features…looks good”.

So let’s take a look at the most popular phones, which are getting lots of atention, and those that actually get rated the highest when consumers take them home:

TOP TEN MOST POPULAR MOBILE PHONES IN LAST 30 DAYS:

1. Nokia N96

2. Samsung F480 Tocco

3. Blackberry Storm

4. Sony Ericsson C902

5. Samsung Omnia

6. Samsung J700

7. Samsung Soul U900

8. BlackBerry Bold 9000

9. Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

10. LG KF750 Secret

TOP TEN HIGHEST RATED MOBILE PHONES OF 2008:

1. BlackBerry Bold 9000

2. Sony Ericsson W980i

3. Apple iPhone 3G 8/16GB

4. Samsung F480 Tocco

5. Sony Ericsson K660i

6. Fly SL600

7. Sagem my411C

8. Samsung J700

9. Samsung Steel

10. Sagem my300C

If you had your heart set on buying someone, or yourself, a stylish yet affordable phone this Christmas, we think the Samsung F480 Tocco is the one to go for. Whilst other phones with similar features tend to get poor scores for battery life, the Tocco impresses with 7.7/10. Here’s what some other phones score for battery life:

Nokia N96 - 5.8

iPhone original - 6.8

iPhone 3G - 5.6

BlackBerry Bold 9000 - 6.3

The Tocco also impresses with its design and features and is £150 for PAYG customers or free on some contracts.

We?ve been looking into design here at Reevoo. Good product design is becoming more and more important and clever and innovative designs are what consumers look for to save time and make their lives a little easier.

So we looked into which brands were coming up with the best designs. When a shopper buys something from one of Reevoo?s 55 retail partners, they are sent an email asking them to rate it. One of the categories they rate is the design of the product.

Looking at 22,000 products, with over 15 reviews, we took these design scores and ranked all of the products in terms of their score for design ? the product with the highest score at the top.

What we found was pretty impressive for one brand in particular. In the top 100 products for design, a whopping 51 of them are from Samsung! It?s a real result for the brand that has put a strong focus on design in recent years.

LG in second place and Sony and Apple in joint third made up the top 3.

If you?re a regular reader of Decide What to Buy, I?m sure you can guess at which product Numatic had in the top 100? Hetty! She?s had a stonking 2008, already topping the best vacuum cleaner list back in June and in March.

But we wanted to look deeper into the data so we split the products up into categories. We looked at Home Entertainment, Mobile Phones, White Goods, Computing and Home and DIY in more detail to see which brand?s products performed the best for design in each category.

And here are the results:

Home Entertainment:
1. Toshiba 46XF355D (television)
2. Samsung LE37A656 (television)
3. Toshiba 40XF355D (television)
4. Samsung LE37A436T (television)
5. Samsung YP-K3JAB 4GB (MP3 player)
6. Samsung YP-P2JCB 8GB (MP3 player)
7. LG 32LG5010 (television)
8. Sony Bravia KDL32W4000U (television)
9. Pioneer Kuro PDP5080XD (television)
10. Samsung PS50Q97HD (television)

Mobile Phones:
1. Samsung F480 Tocco
2. Apple iPhone 8/16GB
3. Nokia 8600
4. Motorola PEBL U6
5. Samsung P520 Armani
6. Motorola W375
7. Sony Ericsson W890i
8. Sony Ericsson T650i
9. Motorola ROKR U9
10. Nokia 7500

White Goods:
1. Bosch KTR18P20GB (fridge)
2. Miele GT 316 ES (freezer)
3. AEG-Electrolux Santo 75348KG (fridge-freezer)
4. Baumatic BF207SLM (fridge-freezer)
5. Kenwood GT/AL17 (microwave)
6. Samsung RSA1DHMH (fridge-freezer)
7. Daewoo ERF336MB (fridge-freezer)
8. Samsung RSH1DTMH (fridge-freezer)
9. Miele KFN 8762 SDed (fridge-freezer)
10. Samsung RSH1DBBP (fridge-freezer)

Computing:
1. Apple MacBook MB403
2. SONY Vaio VGN CR31Z
3. HP DV9646EM RECON
4. ACER M1100
5. Dell Inspiron 1525
6. HP DV9702EA
7. Compaq Presario V6642EM
8. HP V6630EM
9. HP DV9705
10. Toshiba Equium P200-1ED

Home & DIY:
1. Numatic Hetty (vacuum cleaner)
2. Neff B1442NO (oven)
3. Neff B1442S0 (oven)
4. Neff U1322N1GB (oven)
5. Electrolux Insight EKT6045X (oven)
6. Bosch HBN1315 (oven)
7. Prestige 47433 (steam cooker)
8. Bosch HBN131251 (oven)
9. Aeg B41014 (oven)
10. Neff B1422 (oven)

If it wasn’t enough to launch the N96, Nokia have also come up with exclusive N96 TV. ‘Capsule 96′ will broadcast ‘mobisodes’ that are all 96 seconds in length - nice stunt, hey? These ‘mobisodes’ – sorry, it’s such a silly word that I had to use it twice – will feature topics such as fashion, comedy, gadgets and motoring with appearances from people like the designer Wayne Hemingway.

Capsule 96 is supposed to appeal to those with little time on their hands who want “infotainment” on the go. It all seems a little odd to me but hey, it could work…

Not content with simple maps, Nokia have teamed up with Lonely Planet to create a mobile tourist map extravaganza.  Adventurers can download city guides to their mobiles for over 100 hot tourist destinations so that the “where shall we eat” question need never be uttered again. Among the restaurant recommendations, you can also find where to sleep, shop, visit and boogie. No more heavy books and highlighters to pack in with your toothbrush and sleeping bags.

There was mutual love-giving from Nokia and Lonely Planet with Maximilian Schierstadt, head of media partnerships, at Nokia context-based services, saying: "Lonely Planet is a well-known brand amongst travellers and stands for adventure and editorial independence.

"We are very excited to offer their expert local recommendations and itineraries to our Nokia Maps consumers, which will allow Nokia to continue to innovate and enable compelling location-aware experiences."

Stephen Palmer, CEO of Lonely Planet Publications, added: "This is a genuinely transformational deal, which makes Lonely Planet content available regardless of time or place… Together with Nokia we will help more travellers connect profoundly with their world, everyday."

You can get your hands on the city guides from today. They’re £5.99 / USD 13.99 / EUR 7.99, and can be found in the Guides section in the Extras menu. For more info, head to Nokia.

It’s Sony to the rescue this week. It seems Sony Ericsson need a little help in the shape of the Bravia brand. Much like branding previous handsets with the Walkman and Cybershot labels, Sony Ericsson hope that Bravia handsets will have the same success.

However, rumour has it that Sony chiefs fear they may have made a big mistake by letting the brand go so quickly - especially as the new Sony PSP phone is in the pipeline.

Whether it was a mistake or not, only time will tell but it’s a little too late for regrets. Bravia handsets have already been launched in Japan and will soon be available in India where the exponential growth in mobile usage will be favourable for the brand.

[techradar]

More treats from shoppers…

"lots of fun for everyone (well maybe not the neighbours!)" Karaoke Duets DVD

"the gary neville of tvs" LG 32LC46

"the touch screen can be quiet confusing after having a drink" LG KF600

"I think my grandson may have used it as a hammer. Perhaps it should have stood up to that kind of treatment" Motorola RAZR V3

"Shooting old ladies in the head does become tiresome" Grand Theft Auto IV XBOX 360