TRE Talk Radio Europe gadgets for March 2016

The gadgets I chose this month for TRE Talk Radio Europe's The Daily all claim to be world exclusives in their way:

New Apple iPhone SE

Yesterday evening Apple announced a new iPad and a new iPhone.

The new iPad is the 9.7-inch iPad Pro – which effectively brings the original size of iPad up to top spec. Six years ago it all started with the 9.7-inch iPad, then came the smaller iPad mini, then came the iPad Air, which was thinner, and then we had the iPad Pro, which was bigger and with better specifications. Now there’s a smarter version in the original size – better display, powerful processor, clip-on keyboard – yours for £499 in the UK (or €679 in Spain).

But it’s the iPhone SE that’s really caught my eye. Apple is calling this “the most powerful phone with a four-inch display” – and that’s the interesting part, because phone screens have generally been getting bigger and bigger. Last September, Apple launched the iPhone 6S with a 4.7-inch display, while the iPhone 6S Plus has a 5½-inch display. In its way, this new handset is turning the clock back to 2013, which is the last time Apple announced a phone this small.

In fact, you could describe it as an updated version of the iPhone 5S, which it’s pretty much replacing. But although it’s the smallest in Apple’s current range of phones, it’s more like an iPhone 6S under the cover. There’s a fingerprint scanner for security, the company’s new 12 megapixel camera, HD video recording and NFC technology for mobile payments – all inside an aluminium body. If you compare it with the iPhone 5S, which was launched around three years ago, you could easily argue it’s more than twice as powerful.

It’ll be available in the shops from 31st March, with the 16GB version costing £359 in the UK or €489 in Spain.

LM Cable

This is being described as “the world's first iOS and Android common connector”. In simple terms, it’s a cable that can connect either an iPhone or an Android phone to your computer – or can be used to charge either an iPhone or an Android phone.

It’s being offered via Kickstarter with prices from 25 Australian dollars including shipping (around £13). Bear in mind that Kickstarter isn't a conventional shop; there are more risks involved if you back a project.

In its way the cable is very simple. On one end is a conventional USB plug. On the other is a 2-in-1 connector that can work on microUSB and Apple Lightning devices. One side of the 2-in-1 connector is for Apple devices; the other for microUSB devices, like Android phones and tablets. It’s just a question of putting the plug into your phone the right way round.

It’s a very neat trick and means if you’re the kind of person who carries a charging cable with you, then you only need one cable... even if you have a mixture of Apple and Android devices. However, if you want to charge more than one device at once, you’ll still need two cables.

LM Cable, the business behind it, say it’ll support fast data transfer and 2.4-amp fast charging. It’s a metre long, it comes with a little loop that wraps round it to keep it tidy and it’s made with tin-plated copper wires, which means it should be tougher than some other cables.

The Kickstarter campaign has about a week to run. They were after 5000 Australian dollars before they went ahead; the last time I checked, they weren’t far off a quarter of a million dollars in pledges.

Twistear

These promise yet another exclusive: they are being called “the world's first tangle-free high performance headsets with a flexible dual self-winding system”.

If you use a hands-free headset on your mobile phone, the wires can often get tangled. Not just tangled with themselves but you can get them caught on your coat buttons, caught on your belt, caught on your bicycle handlebars, caught on a door handle as you walk past – and it’s the same problem whether you’re talking hands-free or listening to music. Worse still is when your phone rings and you try to plug your headset in but it’s turned into a nest of wires.

That’s where twistear.com enters the scene. They’ve put a retractable mechanism in the middle. Now, there are already other companies out there doing this kind of thing, but Twistear claims to be unique.

To start with, you can set the length of the cables of the Twistear headsets independently. What that means is you can pull or retract the plug part and the headphones part separately. That’s particularly useful because there’s a clip on the winder in the middle of the cable, so you can put it on your belt or your pocket.

The earphones are high-quality, which is important if you like your music, and they’ll clip together when they’re not being used. Plus there’s a microphone on the cable for hands-free calls. If you’re interested in the specifications, the frequency response for the earphones is between 20Hz and 20KHz.

Twistear has been in development for three years, they’re due to start shipping in August and they’re also currently being offered via Kickstarter. Pricing is from $24 including shipping (£17; €21). It’s not quite reached its funding goal but seems to be on course at the moment.

TRE Talk Radio Europe gadgets for February 2016

This week it’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which is THE big mobile phone trade show for Europe, if not the world. Samsung has announced two new flagship smartphones - the Galaxy S7 and the S7 edge, both of which have evolved from the previous models - while LG's new G5 smartphone is taking a new direction with its optional plug-in modules.

But the first device I chose to look at isn’t from one of those big names.

Cat S60 smartphone with thermal camera

It’s from CAT, the company best known for making construction equipment – massive tractors and bulldozers, that kind of thing – although they’ve lent their name to mobile phones for the past few years. As you might expect, they produce phones that are tough enough to survive being dropped or caught in the rain.

You won't be surprised to hear there’s a camera built into the phone – we’ve had those for around 15 years – but alongside the conventional 13 megapixel camera is a thermal camera as well.

The camera part is from a company called FLIR, who specialise in this kind of thing. It means people will be able to use this smart phone for things like detecting heat loss around windows and doors, working out where insulation is failing, seeing if electrical equipment is getting too hot and – everyone’s favourite – seeing people or animals in complete darkness.

Heat can be detected from up to 100 feet away and displayed as contrasting colours on screen.

As expected, it’s also pretty tough: waterproof to depths of up to 5 metres for one hour – that pretty much makes it an underwater camera, if you want – and it can withstand being dropped onto concrete from up to 1.8 metres.

Other specifications include a 4.7-inch HD screen and 4G data connectivity. It runs Android and is expected to go on sale later this year for around £500 / €649 SIM-free.

Sound Blaster Roar Pro Bluetooth Speaker

My next gadget is a Bluetooth loudspeaker: technology I’ve talked about before. You can send music from your phone to a Bluetooth loudspeaker without using a wire – and because the loudspeaker is bigger than the one in your phone, the music sounds better.

Creative Labs, who produce the Sound Blaster range of products, have now taken this a step further.

They’ve produced the Creative Sound Blaster Roar Pro, which is the successor to their regular Sound Blaster Roar product.

It’s not a single Bluetooth speaker – it’s actually a loudspeaker system in a box, with five speaker drivers, including a subwoofer, a pair of high-frequency drivers and two speakers that fire sound out of the side. Inside is an amplifier for the low and mid-range sounds, another for higher frequencies. As you’d expect, you can adjust the tone as well.

It’ll fill a room with sound – whether that’s an office or a classroom. All this in a box that weighs just over a kilogram and is 8 inches long: the same sort of size as a big, black book. It runs off a rechargeable battery that’ll keep it going for up to ten hours and can even recharge your phone.

The clever part is the optional wireless microphone you can get, which turns this from a Bluetooth speaker into a public address system.

So – you buy your Creative iRoar Mic and instead of having to lug around a heavy amplifier, a microphone and miles of cable that someone will trip over, you just take this little box and your iRoar microphone. This can be held, hung round your neck or clipped to your jacket. It’s three inches long and just over an inch wide.

Despite being wireless, it’s very low latency – which means there’s not a long delay between you talking and the words coming out the speaker. And there are volume controls on the mic, so you don’t need to run back to the main box.

As well as all this, there’s a built-in microphone on the unit itself, so you can connect your phone by Bluetooth and turn it into a very loud speakerphone.

Sound Blaster Roar Pro is priced at £169.99 and the Creative iRoar Mic is £64.99 (around €300 total).

Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+ portable games console

Back in the days before flat-screen televisions, producing a pocket-sized TV was a bit of a challenge. However, in 1966, a chap called Clive Sinclair managed to do exactly that. He went on to produce the world’s first pocket calculator in 1972 and then moved into home computers, with the ZX80 (pretty much the first computer that cost under £100), the ZX81 and then the ZX Spectrum, which became the UK's best-selling home computer of all time.

He then went on to produce the C5 electric vehicle, which didn’t do so well, and a range of bicycles too – but although he’s not stopped working, he’s not been in the headlines so much.

Last year, he produced the ZX Vega, which was a tiny games console combined with a controller that plugged into your TV, so you could play around a thousand games on this single device.

His latest product does what he’s very good at: taking his previous idea and making it better. This is the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+, which is described as the world’s only hand-held LCD games console that can also connect to your TV - and has a thousand licensed games inside. So this one’s got an LCD screen and rechargeable batteries as well. You can use it when you’re out, you can use it around the house, and you can plug it into your TV.

The concept design is by Rick Dickinson, who designed all of Clive Sinclair’s ZX computers, while its hardware and operating system have been developed under the leadership of Chris Smith, who’s a former ZX Spectrum games developer and also wrote a technical manual for the Spectrum.

Not only does it have a thousand games built in, it can also run every Spectrum game that exists – that’s something like 14,000 of them. If you weren’t around in the 1980s, you might not appreciate quite how popular these little computers were: most people couldn’t justify the price of a proper computer but you could afford a Spectrum. Around 5 million of them were sold.

This is currently being offered on crowd-funding site Indiegogo for £100, with production and shipping due before the autumn this year.

Zoom Arq

Zoom is a Japanese company that I’ve known about for a number of years because they produce recording equipment: little multi-track recorders, the kind of thing that’s really useful if you’re in a band or you make podcasts, because some of the combinations of features you don’t really get anywhere else.

And then last month they announced this thing. It looks a bit like a fat Frisbee and is called the Zoom Arq – or, to name it correctly, the ZOOM ARQ Aero RhythmTrak.

It's a drum machine, a sequencer, a synthesizer, a looper and a MIDI controller.

Arq comes in two parts: there’s a base station with a wireless connection to what they call the ‘ring controller’.

In the base station are hundreds of drum and instrument sounds, and various ways to connect it either to a computer or to an amplifier. On the ring controller are pressure-sensitive pads for playing drum sounds or musical notes. You can also program or sequence these. It senses movement so, if you want, you can incorporate that in your performance, too.

In a nutshell, it’s a musical instrument that you can program, it’s also a drum machine… and because it’s wireless, you can even dance around the stage when you’re using it.

So, for example, you can create really complicated drum parts by programming it – or you can play it live. You can write music on it. You can play music on it. You can record sounds, change them and then play them back in a repeating pattern. And you can control other musical instruments. All this can be done in a recording studio, into a computer or live on stage.

Availability expected in stores May 2016; I'm expecting pricing to be around £425 (€550).

Scam Victims Compensation Sanction

This was flagged as spam email when I received it. Surely it's post-modern art?

This is to bring to your notice that the US Department of the Treasury in affiliation with the Office of Foreign Assets Control ("OFAC") has been authorized in their Sanction Programs to compensate 1,000 scam victims who has being a victim of internet scam.The US Department of the Treasury has decided to pay you $250,000.00 USD(Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand United States Dollars) each in order to restore the global economy to the enviable standard of respectability.

Your particulars was mentioned by one of the syndicates who was arrested as one of the victims of their operations.You are hereby warned not to communicate or duplicate this message to him or her for any reason whatsoever as the US SECRET SERVICE is already on trace of the other criminals,these information should remain confidential till they are all apprehended,other victims who have not been contacted can submit their application as well for scrutiny and possible consideration.

You will be contacting Richard Berner directly by replying to this email for the release of your $250,000.00 USD compensation fund,he's the director of the Office of Financial Research (OFR).You are also advised to provide him with the under listed information for verification:

1)Full Names 2)Home Address 3)Nationality: 4)Age 5)Sex 6)Occupation 7)Phone Number.

Best Regards,
Jacob J. Lew
Secretary of the Treasury

TRE Talk Radio Europe gadgets for January 2016

My 'gadget guru' conversation on TRE Talk Radio Europe this month included a few products that had been showcased at CES, the consumer electronics show held in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago:

As well as providing a good idea of the trends we’ll be seeing in technology, CES also offers an opportunity for manufacturers to grab the headlines with some particularly audacious products. One such company was Ehang, based in China, which has scaled-up the concept of a regular remote-control drone and has made one big enough to carry a person.

Ehang 184 passenger drone

These days, what most people describe as a drone is a remote-control aircraft between 30cm and a metre across, with three or four sets of battery-powered rotor blades that spin horizontally to keep the device in the air. They often have a camera attached and some can be controlled from your mobile phone or tablet.

The Ehang 184 follows a similar principle. It has an aluminium frame with four pairs of propellers, it runs from rechargeable batteries and can carry a person weighing up to 100kg (around 16 stone).

Flight time is around 20 minutes, with the batteries taking two hours to charge. It’s not meant to reach the heights of an aircraft – it’s designed to fly by to 500 metres off the ground, although it can go higher – and has a top speed of 63mph.

During the flight the pilot/passenger sits inside an air-conditioned cockpit that looks a bit like a helicopter. They program the route into a tablet, then tell it when they're ready to take off and when they want to land. After landing, the propellers can be folded upwards so the whole thing fits in a car parking space.

Pricing is expected to be something like £175,000 when it goes on sale this year, according to the company. Of course, the big question is where you’ll legally be allowed to use it – there are already plenty of regulations about smaller drones, never mind one that’s holding a person.

LG HOM-BOT Turbo+ vacuum cleaner

This was also on show at CES: it's being described as the industry's first robotic vacuum cleaner equipped with augmented reality technology.

We’ve had robot vacuum cleaners for a few years now. Generally speaking, they look like a fat Frisbee, they run off rechargeable batteries and drive themselves around your floor; avoiding furniture, going under the sofa and remembering where they’ve been.

LG has been making these for a while... and now they’ve added augmented reality technology (a feature called 'HomeJoy') to their new cleaner, which is the HOM-BOT Turbo+. This lets you use a special app on your phone to tell the vacuum cleaner about parts of the room that need extra cleaning. You take a photo of the room using the camera of your phone and then tap on the appropriate part of the image. When you’ve done that, your HOM-BOT Turbo+ heads over there and begins cleaning. You can also steer it there yourself, using your phone as the controls, depending on your preference.

Like some other robot vacuum cleaners, this LG machine has camera sensors that record the surrounding area to track where it has already cleaned. It also has a camera on the front that you can watch on your smartphone. One of the things you can do remotely is control the vacuum and clean your home from wherever you are – but, perhaps more importantly, you can also use it as a security camera. It can even send you photos when it detects movement in the house.

Availability and price haven’t been confirmed yet but I’d expect it to be upwards of £500 when it goes on sale.

Withings Thermo WiFi-connected thermometer

Withings makes a lot of health-related technology, from watches that monitor your running to bathroom scales that keep an eye on your weight.

They’ve now come up with the Withings Thermo, which they describe as a WiFi-connected temporal artery thermometer. It looks like a slightly flattened cylinder; nothing like a conventional thermometer.

Apparently the temporal artery at the side of head is a particularly good place to measure body temperature. The challenge is doing it accurately.

So the Withings Thermo has 16 infrared sensors to detect heat. When you hold it against your head and press the 'on' button, those sensors take 4,000 measurements in 2 seconds – and it also works out how it’s being affected by the ambient temperature in the room.

It then sends the temperature readings via WiFi or Bluetooth to your smartphone where they can be seen on a special application. This means it’s much easier to keep track of someone’s temperature if they’re ill: you can see if it’s going up or down every time you check, without needing to write it down each time.

There’s also a display on the device in either Celsius or Fahrenheit; it’ll glow green for normal temperature levels and either orange or red if the person's temperature is higher than it should be.

It runs off two AAA-size batteries and should go in sale in the new few weeks for around $99.95 (around £70).

SoundBrake

Away from CES, this is a project that’s on Kickstarter. It’s a tiny little device called SoundBrake – and it’s designed to alert you to outside sounds when you’re wearing headphones.

So, for example, you could be on a train, listening to music through your headphones and you might miss an important announcement. Or you’re wearing headphones in the office and someone calls to you but you don’t hear them. Or you’re at home wearing headphones and you don't notice a knock on the door.

That’s where SoundBrake does its job. It’s a little box that’s about an inch-and-a-half square, with a standard 3.5mm headphone plug on one side. In it is a microphone, some clever electronics and rechargeable battery that’ll last for up to 100 hours.

This tiny box works with almost any audio player to alert you to outside sounds. So you plug it into your music player, your phone or your computer, and then you plug your headphones into it.

You then set a volume alert level that’s higher than the current average background noise level. So if you’re in an office with air conditioning, you can make sure it’ll only respond to noises that are louder than the air conditioning. There’s a button to set the level automatically and there are a couple of buttons to fine-tune the level up or down.

When there’s a loud noise, SoundBrake temporarily turns off your audio to let you know that something’s up.

Pricing is $49 (£35); availability is due in April.

Come, They Trolled Him

November 2015: Digital Cinema Media (DCM), which arranges advertising for many of the UK's biggest cinemas (Cineworld, Odeon and Vue), decides not to take an ad from one potential client.

"Astonishing, disappointing and rather bewildering", says the client, which happens to be the Church of England. DCM says its policy is not to accept any political or religious advertising. "Some advertisements - unintentionally or otherwise - could cause offence to those of differing political persuasions, as well as to those of differing faiths and indeed of no faith." An appropriately sensitive decision or a threat to free speech?

Much press coverage follows.

December 2015: Advertising network Churchads.net and Christian communications business Premier approach DCM with a potential ad to promote their 'Christmas starts with Christ' campaign.

DCM declines again, for exactly the same reason. ”DCM has a long-standing policy of not accepting political or religious advertising in the cinemas we represent."

Press coverage follows. Once more.

TRE Talk Radio Europe gadgets for December 2015

This month's 'gadget guru' chat with Dave Hodgson on TRE included some ideas for Christmas presents...

Gamevice mobile gaming controller

At the moment, certainly here in the UK, you can’t move without seeing an advertisement for some kind of Christmas game console deal. Either you’re spending a few hundred pounds on a Microsoft Xbox or you’re spending a few hundred pounds on a Sony PlayStation.

All the while you’re probably carrying around a powerful computer in your pocket: your smartphone.

Now, mobile gaming is very popular but for many people it’s not as good as a console because of the way you control the action. That’s where this company called Gamevice comes on the scene.

They’ve made a games controller for iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s and 6s Plus devices. This kind of thing has been done before but what’s particularly nice with this product is the way it looks – it effectively clips on either end of your phone, leaving the screen in the middle. So you don’t have a separate controller; it all becomes one. It fastens magnetically and has its own rechargeable battery so it won’t drain the iPhone too quickly.

A typical console controller will have a four-way pad on one side, separate buttons on the other, perhaps a pair of joysticks and some kind of trigger or firing control for each hand. This does the same.

It works with over 750 iPhone games including some of the biggest: Minecraft, Final Fantasy 7, Halo, FIFA16, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto… the company makes an app that lets you check which games work with its controller.

Pricing is £79.95 (€109.95) for the iPhone version – there’s also one available for the iPad Mini – and you can order online or find it in Apple stores.

Polaroid Zip instant photo printer

Once upon a time, in the olden days, we’d put film in our cameras, take photos and then get the film developed – which usually took about a week if you were relying on someone else to do it.

Then came the Polaroid camera, which produced instant pictures on special film.

And then came digital cameras and smartphones, which made it easier to print photos at home.

But there’s a bit of a trend away from printers at home – most of the time you don’t need one – which almost seems a backwards step, particularly when more photos are being taken than ever before.

So along came the Polaroid Zip instant mobile printer earlier this year. It connects to your phone via Bluetooth (and if you’ve got NFC technology on your phone, you can connect simply by touching the two devices together).

The Zip printer itself is around 4 inches long: 120mm x 74mm x 23mm, weighing 186g and running off rechargeable batteries that’ll last for around 25 prints.

It costs £109.99 (around €150) and needs special photo paper, which works out at around 50p a go. This is Polaroid’s own paper called ZINK, which is short for zero ink. That means you don’t need to buy ink cartridges; like the old-fashioned film, the clever technology is in the paper. And what’s rather nice is you can peel off the back of the photos and they’ll stick to things. Photos are around 2 inches by 3 inches and, unlike a wet Polaroid, won’t smudge.

If you want something a little different, there’s a similar product on its way that actually clips to an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy smartphone - this is the Prynt case - but that’s probably not going to be available until January next year.

Vinturi wine aerator

With red wine, most people tend to agree that it’s best to decant it or at least allow it time to ‘breathe’ before you start drinking – because it improves the aroma and the taste.

Which is all very well, but it doesn’t really work if you decide you fancy a glass of wine or if someone turns up for dinner with a bottle that you want to start straight away.

That’s where you need your Vinturi aerator. It’s made of clear acrylic. You hold it over a glass, pour your wine through and it’s ready to drink.

The way it works – and you can hear it work – is that the wine pulls in air through little holes on the side of the device as it pours through. Unlike other devices, it doesn’t need batteries and it doesn’t need any waiting time, it simply uses basic physics.

I was given one of these for Christmas last year and I love it. I’m a bit embarrassed because they’ve been around for a few years but I’ve only just discovered them. Apparently it’s even dishwasher safe, although I just run it under the tap when I use it.

Pricing is usually somewhere around the £40 mark but here in the UK a few places have them on offer at the moment.

Perhaps best of all, it's a Christmas gadget that doesn’t need batteries!

Millennium Falcon Multi Tool

The new Star Wars film comes out next week - and I’ve talked before about the Star Wars BB8 droid, which is going to be at the top of a lot of people’s Christmas shopping lists.

But I’ve found something else that’s much more practical and costs a fraction of the price. It’s a multi-tool in the shape of the Millennium Falcon (which, if you don’t know, is flown by Han Solo in the film).

Anyway, this is a modern version of the old bicycle spanner, which was a flat piece of metal with various hexagonal holes in it.

This Millennium Falcon Multi Tool is made on the same principle – and it can do 11 different things (12, if you include 'looking like a tiny spaceship').

There’s a screwdriver, a bottle opener, a wire stripper and a ruler as well as various spanners and a couple of other tools.

It’s officially licensed, it measures around 13cm long and 8cm wide – and it’s £9.99. Keep it in your glovebox, in your handbag, in your briefcase, in your backpack – or in your cycle bag.

Once again, no batteries required.

Lewes 'North Street Quarter' development

The South Downs National Park Authority has just approved a planning application from Lewes District Council and Santon North Street to redevelop the North Street Industrial Estate, formerly the location of John Every's Phoenix Ironworks.

These are the closing words of Neville Harrison, who chaired the planning committee meeting:

I really did come into this room with an open mind. I think we've had a very good debate. Lewes is in the National Park and it fought to be in the National Park, so there's a huge responsibility for us - but I think it's opened... there are some very big opportunities that being in the National Park offers.

I have watched this application develop from something which clearly would not have got anywhere near what is required for the National Park, to something that clearly is getting very close. It's not perfect - I'm sure we'll all agree that - but there's such a lot of good things here that I am persuaded that I will vote in favour of the officer's recommendation.

I thought by now somebody would have quoted Thomas Paine - but I think I should quote Thomas Paine, because Thomas Paine said "a moderately good thing is not as good as it ought to be". Well, maybe this isn't as good as it ought to be, but on the other hand "the best can be the enemy of the good". That's Voltaire. So I think we've got something which is pretty good here.