I have 2x New Trent 5000mAh battery chargers and 2x Philips SCE4430/05 battery chargers.

The New Trent 5000mAh will give me about 40% extra power on my iPad (which already enjoys a massive 10 hours battery power), or I can get around 3x full charges of my iPhone 4.

The Philips SCE4430/05 which I have previously mentioned here and here, will give me around 1x full charge of an iPhone 4. I actually do have 3x of these and not 2, although one requires a reverse adapter (which I conveniently forget) so I tend to not use this one so much.

So in essence if I take all 4x battery chargers out I can get a massive 8x full charges of an iPhone. For the most part I never usually have to charge up my iPad as I’m never away for more than 10 hours from an electrical plug socket, but it’s nice to know I have some power on tap if I need it.

For the most part if I’m only out and about for a few hours then I’ll take my Philips SCE4430/05 with me, or if I’m out for 5+ hours then I’ll carry around the New Trent 5000mAh charger. I usually keep at least one in the car, so if I need to I can run back to the car to get additional juice.

The great thing I like about both of these battery chargers is they have a standard USB socket on them, so pretty much any USB cable you have for a phone or gadget will connect into these devices. So no real need for these attachment bits that some chargers come with (and that you always happen to lose).

The Philips SCE4430/05 is great for putting into your shirt pocket with ease, the New Trent will fit into your shirt pocket and it’s the same dimensions of the iPhone 4, but a little heavier, so although you could put your iPhone 4 and New Trent charger into the same shirt pocket, it does look a bit on the bulky side.

I always pack at least one of the New Trent 5000mAh battery chargers into a bag I carry whether it’s an iPad bag, gadget bag or even my Messenger (over the shoulder) Laptop bag or rucksack. That way I always have something available fully charged and ready to go just in case I ever need it. You’d be surprised the amount of times you think, I’m running low on battery or I need a quick top-up. Whether it’s in meetings where you might have plug sockets but no charger plug lead to being out in the street, out on location photographing something or at a friends house.

1. The street I’m on managed to somehow get driven down by the Google Street View Car but thankfully 5 houses either side of my house (and including my house) managed to avoid being shown on Google Street View maps.  I’m not entirely sure why, what happened, maybe the radiation being omitted from my house  or perhaps the gun turrets in the front garden, or the sign that says “Google CEO lives here, do NOT photograph).  Actually I don’t have any of the above in the front garden, but it was my first strike at avoiding the Google Street View Car.

 

2. The  second one came at driving through my home town, I noticed the Google Street View car coming up quickly in my rear view mirror, thankfully the car in front of me managed to get out of the way quickly.  I’m not sure if it was due to the excessive waving and flashing of the headlights or whether he planned to take the turn, I managed to put my foot down and make a few left and right turns to avoid the Google Car getting too close (and to this day on the same stretch of road it doesn’t show my car).

 

3. The third came driving in Kings Langley one time in the last year, I came out of a side road to only see the Google Street View car to the right on a main road (already had passed the junction I was at before I managed to reach the junction) – another great escape!

 

4. The fourth came driving counter-clockwise around the M25 this year, I managed to see the Google Street View Car going in the opposite direction too quickly to make my car a complete blur.

More recently on a trip up into the Highlands in Scotland, unfortunately I wasn’t able to escape the evil grasps of the Google Street View car.  I was traveling up through GlenCoe and low and behold what appeared coming towards me at lightening speed was the Google Street View Car….DARN!  It got me!

These past couple of years I felt that Google was trying it’s best to follow me around and capture me.

Some of you might be asking, what’s the problem?  Well I particularly don’t want to be photographed by the Google Street View Car, or any other photo nabbing system that might be out there.  It’s not that I’m doing anything wrong, I’m not skiving off work, speeding or driving illegally.

It’s bad enough with all the CCTV where in London the average person is photographed around 50 times a day as they walk around the streets, on the underground, train networks, on buses, in shops etc, you don’t really want your face blurred out on a street for 10 years do you?

Hard Disk drives you may not know have been around since 1956 and introduced by IBM.  Hard Drives have grown in both strength and size.  They now have shock protection, parking of heads all built-in but also incorporate imminent failure warning systems.  The sizes have grown massively over the years, and we’re now into terrabytes for some users or gigabytes for most users.

SSD’s are the newt way forward, they’re Solid State Drives, e.g. no moving parts.  No latency on having to spin the disk up to speed, e.g. 7200 rpm (revs per minute) and then having to have a head (needle) touch the disk (which can sometimes scratch the surface and damage it under movement/shock).

Think of SSD’s like a memory chip in terms of Solid State, they’re efficient, their quick, there’s no need to spin up a disc, there’s no need to have a head touch the surface.  If you try to access it, it’s there and ready.  When you take an average laptop that can take easily 45 seconds to 1 minute to boot up to the Operating System, be it Mac OS X or Windows 7, swap the Hard Disk Drive out with a Solid State Drive, and you’ll then see speeds of around 13 seconds boot time to the Operating System.  That’s about 3x times faster than a manual Hard Disk Drive.

The speed gain isn’t only seen on boot up, try to run any large weight application like Word, Excel, PowerPoint on Windows and you’ll find that it loads in <1 second.  If you try to do anything that does very heavy Hard Disk Drive access then this is really where you will see great improvements in reduced wait times.

SSD’s aren’t all that rosy though.  They’re still new for one thing, there’s still no average as they’re new on how long they’ll last.  Most manufacturers of SSD’s claim that they will most likely last less than a regular Hard Disk Drive.  Likewise if they start to die, the suggestion is they will die quickly as opposed to a spinning Hard Disk Drive, although I’m not too sure of that.  On average I find my hard drives in laptops last around 2 years or less, so if an SSD were to last 18 months, then I would still be happy if I could get the speed gain that I really crave as a power user.

The other problem with SSD’s is both price and size.  As they’re new, prices are still high although SSD costs are coming down.  Likewise 256gb SSD’s are within the grasp of most end users but if you want something larger than that, they start to get really expensive.

Which manufacturers make Solid State Drives?  Well there’s a good article over at WikiPedia that shows a comparison of which manufacturers make Hard Disk Drives vs Solid State Drives.

Now both my MacBook Air run an SSD and my Toshiba Windows 7 based SSD laptop, and I’m seeing huge amounts of speed enhancement over regular Hard Disk Drives.  I’ve been running the Macbook Air for around 9 months and the Toshiba for about 1 month.  I simply couldn’t go back to a conventional spinning Hard Disk Drive.  The only problem with costs still being high is that both the MacBook Air and the Toshiba both only have 128gb SSD’s and not 256gb SSD’s.  This really isn’t enough and for a lot of my ‘other’ documents that I tend to have in archive as well as mail PST backups, I tend to still have to plug in a removable 512gb Removable USB Hard Disk Drive, but at least most of my programs are running directly from the SSD speeding up the disk access times.

Before I get flamed by a bunch of Android users, let me say that I have both iOS and Android devices. The first reason is that Apple had a head start. Apple is an innovator and although it wasn’t the first to create a tablet, it was most certainly the first to create a tablet that just worked out of the box, with a complete ecosystem.

Apple have the right ecosystem, they have 400,000+ apps at time of writing this, Android have around 200,000 apps and Apple had a head start in the tablet arena over Google.

The biggest thing after talking to both Apple and Google fans that everyone seems to want is a device that’s upgradable. This is one thing that Apple gives all customers for a good 3-4 years. If you take a look at the iPhone 3G it’s still popular and upgraded to iOS 3, iOS 4. Okay, maybe it won’t be supported by iOS 5 perhaps, but there’s a good 3 years usage out of the device. Now take a look at Android. Samsung botched most of their upgrades for the Samsung Galaxy S, most customers couldn’t upgrade their devices because you had to connect it to Samsung Kies PC software, which just didn’t work properly.

Take a look at Sony Xperia devices, most of these wouldn’t see the light of day for an upgrade. Likewise some HTC devices although more lately have been upgradable, it’s only been because of customer pressure. HTC weren’t going to upgrade some of their phones to Gingerbread until customers forced them.

People want a device that isn’t going to be a brick or die of death in a year or two. Although people change their devices they still want to be able to use them or sell them and get a good return. This is the big problem so far with Android, it’s down to the manufacturer and sometimes not even the manufacturer, sometimes it’s down to both the manufacturer and the mobile operator. Where some customers see upgrades in some countries for a given device but not in others, or sometimes some in the same country get an update where others on another network don’t.

Another good reason as to why Apple have such a good run at the tablet market is if you take a look at other manufacturers, Microsoft still after all these years haven’t produced a single tablet (well if you exclude the WinCe devices), and look at HP, they’ve been in this market space several times in the last decade and pulled out. Palm although they weren’t yet competing in the tablet market, were in the mobile market with WebOS which was then bought up by HP, HP then decided to take part in the tablet industry (again), and have now recently decided it’s going to pull out of the tablet market.

Customers also want a device that’s going to work out of the box, not be complicated to use. Apple have this down to a tee. Likewise if you have previously owned an iPod Touch or iPhone then there’s a zero learning curve if you go to the iPad. With Android however, although it works out of the box, there’s a lot of customisation that can be done, things that can be accidentally turned on and off, or from a user perspective (broken) and that also puts off the non-technical users.

Apple have aimed their sales not at the technical user, but the non-technical user, where Android manufacturers seem a lot of the time to be targeting their products at the self confessed techy.

The other thing to think about is it’s fine to provide a device for every single kind of person out there, but this creates massive fragmentation in the operating system. That in turn makes games and apps break, not just once or twice but regularly. Bad news spreads quicker than good news, and although Apple don’t provide things like flash, the average person out there believes the devices tend to be more stable.

It’s also interesting to see how tablet manufacturer’s try to advertise their product. I have to smile when I keep seeing this advert for the Asus Eee Transformer where they actually show the tablet on the TV advert running out of battery. No worry, just plug it into the keyboard to restore some power. If you have a tablet that is capable of something like 10 hours battery power like the iPad, why would you even want to think about advertising that it WILL run out of battery power? That immediately puts me off buying the Asus tablets and I’m sure it puts off a lot of other people too.

At some point the eco seesaw will change, and it may tip in Googles favour or other manufacturers favour, but currently it’s still tipped towards Apple.

I haven’t had these long so I can’t comment on the headband breaking (some videos you can see on youtube) but I must say these are a really good set of headphones and covers a large dynamic range. Even though there’s reports of the headband breaking I don’t misuse products that often or stress them out so I’m hoping that I won’t be affected by this, but only time I guess will tell.

The Studio phones are great and they lock around your ears real well, extremely comfortable and even with no music playing lock out the sound pretty good. The downside to the Studio headphones are that you need to use 2x AAA batteries in them and you don’t want to leave the power button on as the batteries will drain. The batteries are supposed to last for around 50 hours of music play back but I suspect this depends more on how loud you have the music playing. So far I haven’t been able to measure battery performance. It’s a little disappointing that you will have to carry around a spare set of AAA batteries as you can’t use the headphones without these, they’re completely dead otherwise, but it really does improve the quality of the audio.

The ear cups fold in to make them more portable and you get a free zip-up semi-hard case that’s padded to stow them away in when traveling.

The big downside for me is that I bought them both for listening to music outside of an iPhone dock / hi-fi but also for conference calls as they look very comfortable (and are). However you get a lot of cell phone interference coming up the audio cable or through the air to the left speaker and that kind of puts you off when talking or listening. You don’t hear this much if at all when listening to the music but if you hold the iPhone up to the ears you can hear it loud. I really don’t know why Monster would consider including a 3.5mm cable with in-line microphone when this occurs. Maybe they never tested it with a phone combination in their Quality Assurance testing?

Monster provide two cables, one is a red cable for regular MP3 players/iPod Touch which has 24 carat gold connectors and then a black cable that has the same 24 carat gold connectors but has an in-line microphone.

Anyway that aside, the headphones are really good, I’m very impressed with the dynamic range, the bass and the overall sound quality. I only have to have the iPhone on 50% volume most of the time and 60% max and that’s so loud that I can’t hear anyone else talking that’s next to me. You’d never want to put the iPhone up to 100% volume with these as it will be just too loud.

For anyone interested in how bad the GSM interference is on the headphones, here’s a good Youtube video that demonstrates it.

Qualcomm have recently provided the Qualcomm chipset to support the Verizon CDMA iPhone 4 and Qualcomm do have a chipset that works both with CDMA and GSM in one chip and it’s rumoured that rather than having two different iPhone’s one for 3G (GSM) and one for CDMA – this could be likely that the iPhone 5 when released around June/July 2011 will have a dual GSM and CDMA chip at least for North America and maybe for all iPhones.

Also recently with the Verizon CMDA iPhone 4, we’ve seen a slight change in the case structure moving the mute button slightly.  Apple do like to change the design of the iPhones because it then brings them additional revenue in cases through the Apple Stores where Apple take a 30% cut on iPhone approved products, and it’s possible that this might be the new design for the iPhone 5 although the design could change even further.  The iPhone 4 design is a much better design over the iPhone 3GS and I for one am hoping the flat and square look of the iPhone 4 with the glass on the back stays for some time.

There have also been some suggestions that Apple might be ditching the Apple connector for a Micro-USB connector.  Although this is becoming the standard in Europe I still can’t see Apple going away from their standard connector unless they can do everything they can currently do in a much smaller footprint.

Although there are a number of tablets out there running Android OS 2.1 Eclair or Android OS 2.2 Froyo, they’re not designed to be run on a larger screen and have a maximum limit of a 7″ screen. Android is basically stretched to fit which creates all sorts of performance issues. Android 3.0 Honeycomb should overcome that.

The first look at the LG T-Mobile G-Slate although looks promising looks very slow in it’s transitions between screens, but time will tell whether this will compete with the iPad.

Freecom are getting more stylish and are now launching a drive that would go well with the MacBook Air and any ultra-thin laptops that need additional disk space. The new Freecom Hard Disk Drive is only 10mm thick and most possibly the thinnest Hard Drive in an external enclosure.

The new drive comes in a number of different sizes, the most expensive being $199.95 for the 750GB model but also sports USB 2.0 which will be forward compatible to USB 3.0 and Firewire 800. If you don’t need Firewire then you will be able to get the 320GB model for $69.95 and the 750GB model for $109.95.

STM iPad Bag – £18.99
The first being an iPad holdall bag from STM at £18.99 (very compact but has a carry handle and a shoulder strap) and is weatherproofed. It also comes with a number of hidden pockets which makes good for storing charger cables and even an iPhone pocket.

Acase Deluxe Leather Flip Book Case – £19.99
The second case I can recommend is a leather fitting Acase Deluxe Leather Flip Book Case at £19.99 that fits over the iPad nicely and allows you to stand it up in various angles in landscape mode with a notch style system on the case.

Lupo iPad Dock – £15.99
This is the best dock station I’ve found for the iPad so far, it comes with a built-in USB cable so it’s not removable but allows you to plug into any USB mains power plug including the ones supplied by Apple (it doesn’t come with a mains plug though).

Full review available here.

Apple iPad multi-functional desk stand – £18.99
If you’re looking for a good iPad stand that folds away like a tripod then I can recommend the Apple iPad multi-functional desk stand. It’s a little on the pricey side for what it is but it’s a very useful stand and folds away and you can put it in your pocket very easily. Great for using the iPad in both portrait and landscape mode.

It’s not a battery problem, the battery is lasting for about 15 days using TTS. The problem is with Amazon and how they market the device but more so myself.

Amazon claim that you can read for 30 days without charging (and that’s true), and that you can read for 10 days with WiFi enabled (and that’s true). The problem is that it’s a gadget, and with all gadgets you need to charge them. The way Amazon market the device makes me think “I don’t need to charge it today” because it has a lot of battery power remaining. The next day I look at the Kindle 3 and say “Still doesn’t need charging”, and the next “nope, don’t need to charge it” and I eventually get to the point when the battery is run down. The problem is that Amazon have conditioned my brain to think it doesn’t need charging, so I keep running the battery down. I need to somehow get into the daily routing like with the rest of my gadgets to put it on charge so I don’t run the battery down. Last night I crawled into bed, went to turn on the Kindle 3 to find the screen saying the battery was critical again.

Amazon have created a wonderful device, but unfortunately you do still need to charge it

Check out this video review that I put together for the tripod mount for the iPad.

I wanted to extend the coverage and battery on the HD2 (after all it is a mobile device and the battery drains more quickly) so I recently purchased the 3 UK – MiFi unit which is a small WiFi dongle that has it’s own battery source and SIM card slot that connects to the 3 UK mobile network (and unfortunately it is locked to 3). Here’s a review of the unit and how well it stacked up to my other MiFi connectivity on the O2 network.

The reason why I decided to buy the 3 MiFi Huawei E585 was to see if I could get a smaller device that had better battery power than the HD2 and likewise still get the same data rates, and also improve the power on time to being able to connect to the WiFi router when out as it can take a good 3+ minutes before I can connect.

The MiFi is incredibly small and a great device that easy fits in your pocket. The power on time to being able to connect to the 3G/HSDPA network over WiFi is 45 seconds which is better than that of the HD2 as it’s a full mobile phone and then I have to enable the WiFi Router application and that then takes another good 45 seconds, so the 3 MiFi from power on to connection is about 3x faster than the HD2 which is handy when on the move and you need WiFi access quickly.

When you place a non-3 SIM card in the MiFi and power it on you see the “Invalid SIM” message, so unfortunately 3 have now locked down the MiFi models to not use other network SIM’s, so if you want a MiFi then you have to unfortunately use a 3 UK SIM card.

When the device is powered on you’ll see from the second photo above that you get from left to right

- Signal bars
- 3G or H for HSDPA (this is the network connection type)
- WiFi (signifies that the WiFi has been enabled)
- World Symbol (this denotes that you have internet access)
- SMS message symbol (this denotes that you have received text messages)
- Battery power remaining (hopefully fairly self explanatory)

Underneath that you will see the amount of data downloaded in your current session along with the time the session has been open for. Unfortunately there’s no way of telling the total download for the current month directly on the device but you can through the 3 UK Dashboard which I’ll go into later.

I’m not sure why 3 UK decided to make the MiFi display like a mirror, it makes it really hard to read when out in bright sunlight or even indoors with the anti-reflective mirror coating they’ve put on the screen.

Battery Power
3 claim that the battery power is around 4.5 hours. The battery is a 1500mAh battery which is larger than most mobile phone batteries and most reviews claim to be getting in the region of 4-5 hours. I haven’t fully exhausted the battery yet but from tests so far it looks like I am falling within the lower part of that range.

What are the network speeds like?
3 UK claim that they have 95% coverage on 3G/HSDPA and their HSDPA speeds can go up to 7 Mbps. Here’s a comparison I carried out from the same location with the iPad connected to both the 3 UK Mi-Fi and also the HTC HD2 running an O2 UK SIM card.

3 UK Speeds on the Mi-Fi

O2 Speeds on the HD2 using it as a Mi-Fi device

So far you can see that the O2 network speeds seem to be a lot faster using HSDPA. Hopefully 3 will upgrade most of it’s network to higher HSDPA speeds sometime soon.

Performance wise you can see by the speeds above on 3 UK Mi-Fi that the speeds are quite erratic and sometimes I can get a lot faster speeds and sometimes I have had speeds down to as low as 300 Kbps, but the average is 1.8 Mbps which is acceptable for mobile use and hugely faster than GPRS speeds of 56 Kbps.

Get to manage your account and see your monthly usage
With 3 UK if you are using the MiFi you can simply go to http://3.home and this will open up your MiFi configuration page and tell you how much data you have used in the current session and total for the month.

3 UK also provide you with a web console for SMS Text Messages to the device (3 UK sometimes send you messages) and also give you the power to change the SSID, whether it’s broadcasting or not, and also your routers password amongst many other settings.

So far I love the design and size of the MiFi and will be using it a lot more. £15 for 5gb doesn’t seem a lot of bandwidth for your money when you can get similar iPad 3G data plans for the same £15 but you can get up to 15gb, but then again I think 5gb for my monthly usage will probably be hard to reach.

I’m going to be testing it in more hard to reach places like the beach, in hotel rooms, in restaurants typically where cell phone signal is at it’s lowest and will see how well it performs in these scenario’s.

Pros

• Small and compact device
• Battery power lasts 4-5 hours
• Easy to charge with a micro-USB charger connector
• Fast power on times – 45 seconds
• One Month rolling contract at £15 per month
• Contract can be cancelled at any time and restarted

Cons

• Locked to the 3 UK network
• Screen is ultra reflective
• Data speeds aren’t as good as other networks, e.g. 1.8 Mbps on 3 UK vs up to 9 Mbps on O2
• £15 for 5gb although not a bad deal, there are better iPad data plan deals available with double or triple the bandwidth for the same price

The stand is also made of metal and is quite heavy for its actual size, but I suspect the reason for this is to add weight so the iPad doesn’t topple over at any angle.

Up until now I’ve been using a Laptop desktop stand which has been pretty bulky but now I can just place this into my rucksack whenever I travel and be able to stand up the iPad without any worries of having it fall over or having to lay it on the desk each time and risk scratching the back.

The stand is made by Qubits and is available via Amazon for £18.99

This doesn’t bode well, especially seeing LG are also the screen supplier for the new iPhone 4. Let’s hope that Apple can still produce enough iPads even if it has to go to other suppliers for screens.