I’ve spent money on the HD LCD TV, the Blu-Ray player, the Virgin subscription to get HD and now that little bit extra to buy the odd Blu-Ray disks but am I getting the full benefit?  

I’m using a cheap (ish) HDMI cable from a supermarket for the Blu-Ray and the stock one Virgin supplied for HD TV. However you can go out and spend a fortune on cables, with gold plating and special shielding but does it matter? Should you spend under £5 or 10 times that, £50?

In the days of analogue this really did make a difference, the quality of the final picture really could be affected by a cheap SCART cable. HDMI is digital all the way so you don’t really have to contend with the signal loss of analogue, all you’ve got going down these cables are 0s and 1s!

The best comparison we can draw here is that of printing – have you ever considered fitting a better quality cable between your PC and printer so the photo of the family you’re printing comes out better? No, of course not, the cable isn’t going to make any difference to the final quality of the photo!

The same applies to your HDMI cables, in principle you’re sending exactly the same down the cable as if you were printing, just 0s and 1s. So as long as it gets there you’ll get the same picture quality regardless of how much gold your cable has on it!

Obviously, if you get the cheapest cable going there is every chance it may be poorly made and therefore not fit the port correctly or break after only a few months but at the same time there is no need to spend a fortune on that gold plated, nuclear shielded HDMI cable!

1 Enable Memory Cleaning:

Blackberry Button > Options > Security Options > Advanced Security Options > Memory Cleaning > Enable

All blackberries’ store information on the handheld which can contain passwords, email message bodies, and private keys so to eliminate the possibility of data being compromised, Memory Cleaning has been placed on all Blackberry’s but default as Disabled for security.

2 Disabling 3G

Blackberry Button > Options > Mobile Network > Network Mode > Select 2G

The benefits of having 2G over 3G is that 2G can handle both calls, texts and data whereas 3G is optimized for faster transmission of data transfer. 3G can vary to 2G as 2G was introduced beforehand. 3G is obviously in specific areas such as cities where fast data access is required, rural areas and countryside obviously would be 2G. If you leave 2G and 3G enabled, the phone will automatically move from one network mode to another.

3 Removing unnecessary applications

Blackberry Button > Options > Applications > ‘top right, select Add-on’ > ‘all you need to do is select what you want to uninstall and just simply select the name of the program e.g. ‘blackberry maps’ and select ‘delete’

It’s a fact that all phones which leave the manufacture and sold you us comes with a tonne of applications no one would ever use. For games such as Word Mole and Sudoku on a business phone raises the question ‘why?’. Now if your addicted to these games you can leave it installed but personally I just removed it.

4 Disabling Wi-Fi

Blackberry Button > Manage Connections > ‘just make sure that the Wi-Fi is showing a red cross on its status’

It’s the same story different phone but Wi-Fi is one of these add-ons which more of a novelty rather than a useful feature with the Blackberry. If you leave it enabled, it will just simply munch through all of your battery and leave you with a phone which can be used as a paper weight.

5 Handset Security

The possibility of losing your phone or having it stolen is inevitable. Ways of preventing data being taken from the phone however is a measure which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone with a Blackberry.

6 Enabling a Handset Password upon unlock

When you unlock your Blackberry via the Padlock button at the top left of your Blackberry, being prompted for a Password which you can define upon set-up, if someone manages to get hold of your phone and attempts to get into it, either they know the password or after 10 attempts, the phone will just do a security wipe.

To enable the Handset Password,:

Blackberry Button > Options > Password> ‘Select Password as Enabled’ and then enter your desired password

Note: I would recommend a password as Characters opposed to Numbers as you would have to press ‘alt’ every time you want to enter a number.

7 Changing your profile in one click

Blackberry sure knows how to confuse people with their interface but what a lot of people don’t know is that they have actually embedded shortcuts within the keyboard to change profiles. Simply from your home page, simply hold ‘Q’ to go back to your previous profile e.g. if you changed your profile from Vibrate to Loud, you will go back to Vibrate.

8 Quickly insert a full-stop

Whilst in a text message, email or note no matter what you’re doing, if you double space after a sentence, you can insert a full-stop.

9 Switching applications in Multi-Tasking

Its surprising as not a lot of people know this but Blackberry’s do support multi-tasking, Multi-tasking is where an application can be minimized to enable another execution of an application.

Applications such as the Browser, Messenger and more can be minimized into the background. To access it just hold the Blackberry Icon button from your home screen and it will display any background running applications. To re-execute them, just move the cursor to the desired icon and select it.

10 Useful Applications

There is a whole array of applications you can choose from through the Blackberry App World which can be downloaded here.

For sat-nav, I personally use Telmap Navigator which is about as intuitive as a TomTom.

Features include:

• Clear guidance of turn by turn e.g. ‘go left onto the M32 second exit’ and works with Road Names too.
• Point of Interest search with full address, contact numbers etc of Pubs, Petrol Stations and more
• Simplistic easy to use interface
• Can run in the background if you have music playing or a call
• Traffic updates which automatically alert you and re-direct you at the click of a button

It is available for free as a 14-day trial but if you want a full license, you do have to pay £4.99 a month but it’s defiantly worth the money.

Other applications such as Twitter, LinkedIn, DriveSafely and Flixter are all free applications which I would recommend to download and if you don’t find it is not for you, just simply uninstall it.

All you have to do is do the following -

1. Download the iPhone 4 Case Program app from the App Store.
2. Launch the app on your iPhone 4 and sign in using your iTunes Store account or Apple ID.
3. Select your Bumper or case.

Note: For iPhone 4 purchases made before July 23, 2010, you must apply no later than August 22, 2010; otherwise, you must apply within 30 days of your iPhone 4 purchase. To qualify for this program, you must purchase your iPhone 4 by September 30, 2010.

You can apply for a bumper (the only available color is black) or any other qualified case, all of which are free if you’re eligible. It’s a 3-5 week wait for delivery, because nothing in life is quite as easy as it should be.

With an all new Retina Display, the Apple have now crammed a 960X640 backlit LCD display which has a 326pixel per inch making it one of the highest resolution phones on the market. However, to compensate for the energy hungry screen which is very good for watching films on, Apple have also increased the battery life to 300hrs stand-by and 14hrs talktime (2G) lithium-ion polymer battery opposed to the 3GS’s lithium-ion 300hr stand-by and 12hr talktime (2G).

The design to the iPhone is certainly different with its two ‘aluminosilicate glass’ front and back cover with Stainless Steel band outside which is made from Apples ‘own alloy’ which is ‘five times stronger than steel’ .  Just to make it all fancier, Aluminosilicate Glass is used in helicopter windshields and high-speed trains. The iPhone’s central processor has been upped from the 3GS’s 600MHz processor to a staggering 1 GHz A4 processor which is best suited for multi-tasking, quick execution of programs and a faster response from the phone.

We’ve seen no change in the multi-touch iPhones capacitive touch screen as virtually all smartphones now incorporate this feature as it’s more reliable and precise to pressure driven touch screen on handsets like the Nokia 5800. Capacitive Touch screens work by relying on the electrical properties of the human body to detect when and where on the display the user is touching. Because of this, capacitive touch screens don’t work with styluses or a gloved hand; with this type of screen, it also means that the handset can support multi-tap for those quick texters.

With capacity available in either 16 or 32GB storage, there’s always enough room to sync your music, films and apps to the phone. We still have applications like the Compass which is very precise in pointing where you are longitudinal and latitudinal values which means that within Google Maps, you have enable an auto-rotation feature for the maps meaning when you turn, the maps turn; this is good if you are walking around but with no voice turn-by-turn feature, you have to refer back to a sat-nav or purchase either TomTom or Co-Pilot.

For the entertainment factor, we’ve got features such as the ‘App Store’ which allows users to purchase and download applications over the air to keep them amused and entertained; applications range from Social Networking right through to Utilities. Where previous users of iPhone before the release of 4.0 firmware, iPhone users would have had numerous amounts of pages cluttered with applications but since the release of 4.0, Apple have now allowed Folders from a main screen. This means you can have your Twitter, Tweetdeck and Facebook in a Social Networking folder and then have Sky Sports, BBC News apps in a News folder making your interface nice and clean.

With all of the new features Apple have managed to cram into the their handset, compatibility with exchange 2010, an improved 5megapixel camera with LED flash, video calling, front facing camera and new firmware have all been worthwhile updates for Apple to stay competitive within the market and keep all of their current and new customers eager to get hold of one of these new wave of technology handsets and for the public to show their devotion to the Apple brand, queues ranged anywhere between 4hrs-over 24hrs dependent on how much you wanted it and where your position was in the queue.

However, if you are getting ready to upgrade and thinking about going for the iPhone 4, unless you are wanting the higher megapixel camera, sharper density within the screen, faster execution and more speed whilst multi-tasking, there’s not a lot of difference between the two. The mobile phone industry is changing rapidly and rumors have of Qualcomm who design CPU’s for mobile phones are working on 1.3GHz processors for Windows Mobile 7 phones; this means that again, within the fourth quarter another load of phones will come out through LG, HTC and competing manufactures.

For a phone which was discovered in a bar in Redwood City, USA as someone had lost it and from Gizmodo getting hold of it and then leaking it onto the internet, Apple got the media engaged as well as their customers straight away and kept everyone eager to get hold of one, when the iPhone was released Apple managed to sell over 1.7million phones in just three days.

Windows XP is all around us, what a lot of people don’t know is that Windows XP is even installed on ATM’s. I remember the old ATM I used to use in Woolworths which used to Blue Screen but it’s not only ATM’s that use Windows XP, the self-checkout tills in Tesco and Asda are running as well.

For any users who currently use the old Service Packs of Windows XP it’s essential that you upgrade your copy of Windows XP Home, Professional, Media Centre Edition or Tablet Edition before 13^th July 2010 or you won’t receive any help from Microsoft as they are stopping support making Microsoft’s Service Pack 1 and 2 a ‘legacy’ software.

So if you are on Service Pack 2, you can upgrade through Windows Update which is under ‘All Programs’ accessible through your ‘Start’ button at the bottom left of your screen. However, if you are on Service Pack 1, it’s not as easy to go straight to Service Pack 3. You firstly need to go to Service Pack 2 and then upgrade to 3.

Service Pack 3 was released as an upgrade to existing computers running SP2 on 29^th April 2008 (quite a while ago in computer terms) with more security updates and newer features compared to its predecessors. Microsoft didn’t necessarily aim their update to consumers but to businesses that are deploying computers.

Service Pack 3 contains three new areas not in the previous versions:

Networking

• Network Access Protection (NAP) modules and policies have been migrated from Vista. NAP is more of a corporate update
• New updates and patches making it more stable and secure
• Improvement to black hole router detection, for people who don’t know what a black hole router is one that discards packets of data silently.

Security

• A new kernel that provides access to cryptographic algorithms
• To aid users into not selecting the incorrect security settings, Microsoft have made the Control Panel more descriptive.

Miscellaneous

• A new Windows Product activation that doesn’t require users to input a product key during setup
• Can detect routers discarding data
• HD audio support which is going to be beneficial for gamers

To upgrade to Service Pack 3, it’s an easy process to upgrade, just simply go to ‘Start > All Programs > Windows Update’. Once forwarded to the Internet Explorer page, just select ‘Express (Recommended)’ and Windows will do all the updates for you. You will however have to make sure that any current programs are closed, shut, saved and preferably backed up to an external hard drive or another peripheral as your computer will have to restart towards the end of the update.

If you need more information on updating to Service Pack 3, please click here.

On some devices the battery isn’t removable so just carrying a spare isn’t an option; it’s not always the best solution anyway as it doesn’t offer any flexibility if you’ve got several power hungry devices. So what else is out there?

A whole new market has sprung up from nowhere to deal with this issue, every few days over the past couple of weeks I’ve seen a new solution to solve my power problems.

One of the most popular solutions available seems to be a small portable lithium battery which you can charge using a USB socket or a normal plug socket. Most come with a few adaptors so you can charge various devices whilst some have only one phone in mind.

Mophie have just released some mobile batteries with a built in iPhone dock connector, some of them even double as a case! The ‘primocube’ by Primo has just been announced and this will charge anything that has a Micro-USB or Mini-USB connection (Android, BlackBerry etc.). JustMobile have a solution which will allow you to charge any phone which can be connected via USB (pretty much every smartphone, GPS or MP3 player).

There are plenty of other mobile batteries out there; personally I plumped for the JustMobile battery which will charge my iPhone 3 times over. When choosing the right battery for you it’s worth taking note of the mAh rating, the higher the better as this means you’ll get more power from your battery.

Free mobile power?

If your life is so hectic that you won’t even have the chance to charge your spare battery you could try a solar powered charger, there are plenty of options out there which will draw power from the sun. They do have the downside of being slow to charge and you need the sun (not always a common sight in the UK!)

There are some other innovative and enviormentally friendly solutions you could try like the ‘HYmini Personal Wind Turbine’, the ‘Wind-up multi charger’ or Nokia’s bicycle dynamo charger!

Whatever solution to your power problems you choose you can be sure your battery will still die on you at the most inconvenient of times!

Android was first introduced in late October 2008 with T-Mobile’s G1 which came pre-installed with Version 1.0 and soon Google will release their latest version; 2.3.

Speaking for myself, I didn’t really give Android a chance and wouldn’t have swapped my iPhone for the ‘newbie’ on the block. However over the past years, HTC has grown phenomenally and is now waiting to release their sophisticated iPhone killer platform called “Gingerbread” which has certainly made the new smartphone platform look mature. The names Android use for their firmware are controversial as most of their platforms have rather scrumptious names such as Cookie and Éclair.

Android has some features which will startle a lot of people, even the non-techie people. If we take browsing on Android 2.3, it supports flash and it is flexible; this is defiantly something excelling against their competitors which means lots of boredom cured.

Android supports push notifications which mean that your Twitter, Facebook and Emails are pushed automatically to your phone without the hassle of having to re-sync your inbox every quarter of an hour. In addition to this nifty feature, Android also have their ever growing Market which is now catering over 30,000 apps readily available for downloading.

Android have also added over-the-air installation for apps and integration of iTunes streaming. Google have named their music streaming app ‘Simplify Media’ which creates a desktop software that can stream all your music directly from iTunes to your Android phone. Simply all you have to do is point the software at your music and it will push it up into the air accessible anywhere.

Like all smartphones, the new version of Gingerbread is now compatible with all Microsoft platforms including Exchange 2010. Android have also introduced Bluetooth voice commands allowing users with Bluetooth headsets or parrot in-car systems to say a name or number to activate an out-going call.

Overall in conclusion to the new version of Android, it will hopefully be showcased in Q4 2010. There are numerous updates Android has made and all of them are justifiable but the sheer amount of platforms can defiantly perplex even the most technical people. With technology being so subliminal and everyone used to technology being at our fingertips, expectations from manufactures are extremely high hence the upcoming release of Gingerbread. It’s defiantly something I am excited about and it has a lot of new features no other versions of Android has incorporated but remember, your phone must have the minimum specification to run it.

Tom Parker joins our marketing and sales team as a product manager for spider office. Tom has recently finished a degree at Plymouth University.
You can follow Tom on Twitter at http://twitter.com/TomParkerSG

Jess Baker joins our admin team to assist with day to day operations. Jess is an apprentice studying for an NVQ in Business Administration.

James Cook decided that graduate schemes and ready-made careers weren’t for him. So he started up his own IT consultancy, Spider Group, fresh out of university. He explains his story.

Article can be found here:

http://www.smarta.com/advice/starting-up/student/just-the-job-i-started-my-business-straight-after-graduating

So what is HTML5 and is it the future?

HTML5 has been included in all Apple’s latest devices, Safari on Mac and PC support it as well as on the iPhone and iPad. Apple has launched a website to showcase some of HTML5’s features; you’ll need Safari to take a look.

If you like what you see and you’re a developer you can get some help using the effects for your own HTML5 pages. Apple have include code samples and guides on each of the showcased features.

HTML5 is an open standard which anyone can use, view and manipulate. It’s a progression in the language used to create today’s websites, it will enable website developers to create nicer looking websites with features like those demonstrated on Apple’s website. This will eliminate the need to use flash and this is good for a couple of reasons:

1. Adobe flash is a ‘closed’ language, Adobe own it and developers can’t manipulate it.
2. Adobe flash is a separate plug-in for browsers, where as HTML5 support will be built in. The flash plug-in has sometimes been known to be unreliable and cause browsers to crash.
3. Adobe flash can cause security flaws in your computer; a new one was discovered only last week!

HTML5 aims to replace HTML4.01 and XHTML 1.0; it introduces new elements and amends some others. It will provide the functionality developers need to create websites with rich multimedia content.

HTML5 is still in the development phase but is expected to see increasing use towards the end of 2010 and into 2011. It’s not clear if it will end up replacing Flash or end with the two still working side by side. Apple though is convinced that Adobe Flash’s days are numbered!