SomeBackup – Technology Blog

The best Christmas Gadget are still available for your loved ones at R5, open til Christmas eve.

Come on in and check out great gadgets like these:

Mini Air Hockey
You’ll need super quick reactions (and a bit of luck!) if you are to be the winner on this Air Hockey game. Like its bigger brother this miniature version also uses a cushion of air to allow the puck to shoot across the surface. Complete with sound effects and score dials, you can now play this well loved game just about anywhere.

Bladez 3D
Normally as things improve they tend to get smaller. In most cases this for the best and is genuinely well received. Sometimes though, when you spend your hard earned cash, you expect something that can’t fit in the palm of your hand. The last thing you want is to look at something and think “is that it?”. The Bladez 3D certainly can’t be accused of not giving you value for money!

Measuring in at a whopping 38cm it certainly makes some of our other helicopters look a little bit on the tiny side. Due to its size we would recommend this helicopter to ‘intermediate to advanced’ flyers, or in other words, if 9 times out of 10 you can normally fly a helicopter round your partners head without scalping them! It also means that this is not helicopter to terrorise your office colleagues with, although if ‘terror’ is what you’re looking for then maybe it is!

Its extra length means that it is more capable of handling a little breeze now and again, so on a good day can be taken outside. It also has collapsible blades witch is an ingenious idea that we expect other indoor helicopters to copy. The blades are attached by a pivot which takes a lot of the energy away when ever they make contact with anything (but please don’t stick your hand in to find out).

The Bladez 3D is a 3 channel (forwards, backwards, left, right, up & down) helicopter that offers you precision and power, whilst being robust and fun to fly.

Specification:
- Dimentions: 37.5(L) x 8(W) x 17.5(H) cms
- Rechargeable 7.4v Li-Poly (mains adaptor included)
- 3 Channel remote (requires 4 xAA)
- Intelligent RC system reduces interference from other RC users
- Energy saving power cut off
- Smooth hovering performance
- 1hour charge gives 15 minutes flying time.
- Suitable for ages 14+

When it comes to quality Blu-Ray is the current king of the castle. I remember not long back when the PS3 was around £500 just after release and standalone Blu-Ray players were not far from double that amount. Times have changed however and not Blu-Ray is an affordable option if you seek only the best quality when watching movies.

Take the Sony BDP-S500 Blu-Ray DVD Player for example, a top of the range Blu-Ray player that can be picked up for under £400. To be honest though I still cannot see the point in paying that for a Blu-Ray player alone when you can also have a games console built in for the same or cheaper price. My argument is flawed on if –

• You are not a gaming geek like me
• You want the very best from your player

I can see a great argument in both cases as why not to get a PS3 as your Blu-Ray Player. For a start the S500 looks a lot better in my eyes than te clunk and large Playstation 3 and the Sony S500 also has some outstanding features including a wide range of playable formats including CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+-R and RW. The player also has the ability to upscale DVD’s to esolutions of 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Ideal if you don’t want to re-buy all your movie collection on Blu-Ray Disc.

I guess prices would have to drop at least another 25% to warrant me owning both, but for me its still too expensive when I can have the Playstation option.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone, its the best mobile I have ever had but it seems that now the novelty has worn off it is quite easy to pick out some major faults with the phone. I have a black 8Gig 3G model and here goes:

Camera – Its very basic, too basic for such a phone. I think the spec is about 2MP and with other phones coming out with 5MP as standard and camera phones having upto 8MP it just seems that it was chucked in there to say it has one. To top it off there is no functionality at all – no flash, no zoom and video mode.

Speaker – The speaker for music i very poor, but its not this I have problems with. I don’t like to walk around playing my music to everyone, just to me. What I have a problem with is the quality of the calls I receive. I have often had to ask people to repeat what they are saying because the speaker is crackling or just unclear.

Those are the issues I have had with my phone. I know someone who is still using the original iPhone and the battery charge icon has stopped working so you have no idea how much charge you have left i the phone and a friends 3g model decided yesterday that it wanted to stay in the phone option and not return to the main menu or even turn off. Even after a forced restart it returned to the phone menu so there was no way to even read text messages let a lone do anything else.

Looks like there might be a few bugs to iron out before the next version. But like I said, I love it and still would not change it for any other phone!