Talking about technology, and more
Nov 2
Reviews 2 Comments
accessories, bizz, bluetooth, bluetrek, card, charging, drive, flash, free, hands, handsfree, headset, mate, memory, micro, mobile, mobile mate, pairing, reader, sandisk, sd, sdhc, secure digital, usb, writer
We have a hardware review today. Mobilefun.co.uk have kindly sent me a Bluetooth headset to try out – the Bluetrek Bizz.
The BlueTrek Bizz Bluetooth Headset
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Oct 21
Mobile News 8 Comments
bluetooth, free, linux, mobile, nokia, open, phone, s60, series 60, source, symbian, ubuntu, unix, usb
S60 & Linux
I have had another article published on AllAboutSymbian.com. This time I wrote about how to maintain connectivity between your phone and computer after switching from Windows to Linux.
This is based on my own experience after switching exclusively to Ubuntu Linux, and having spent time working out how to still support my mobile phone.
Topics covered include: how to back up files, transfer photos, synchronise your music and connect to the internet via your phone.
If you’d like to read it, here’s the link:
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Aug 24
Reviews 9 Comments
drive, eagletec, flash, miniature, mobilefun, nano, storage, tiny, usb
We have a hardware review today. This is the smallest USB flash drive I have ever seen, and I wanted to try one out. So thanks to MobileFun.co.uk for sending one out to me for review.
EagleTec 8GB Nano
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Aug 19
How-To Guides 5 Comments
accessories, battery, charging, electrical, energy, mobile, mobilefun, phone, power, powerpal, retractable, usb
I thought I’d share some alternative ideas for charing up your mobile phone today. Even the most compact mains chagers are bulky, and they give you yet another cable to be collecting dust and taking up space. So here are my two favourite methods for getting my phone topped. In fact, in all the time I’ve had my current phone, I have never used the mains charger.
USB charging my phone
1. USB Charging
These days, the chances are, when you’re at home and at work, you’ll have some time at the computer. What you may or may not know is that USB ports provide power, as well as carrying data. So my first suggestion, and my everyday charging method, is by USB, with a neat & tidy little retractable USB charger. I got my 2mm Nokia charger from Mobile Fun.
Retractable cables are great for saving space, although I have found that you need ot handle with with care because they can become quite fragile. With the charger I use, I occaisionally have to wiggle and turn it before my phone announces that it’s charging. Not great, but I do prefer it to a proper USB cable.
In the future, USB charging is going to become more common place. One of the worst things about mobile phones has been all the different types of connector. Last year all the major phone manufacturers got together and agreed to use a common standard, which was “Micro USB“. This has the added advantage that it will be one single port for plugging your phone into your computer (some of us do this!) and for charging. That is, you’ll be able to use your phone’s data cable to charge it from your computer’s USB ports!
Charging my phone with the PowerPal
2. The “PowerPal”
For times when I’m going to be away away from the charging station that is also called my laptop, I can run my phone from an AA battery, by means of sexy looking chrome tube, known as the Power Pal, which I also bought from Mobile Fun (I’m not advertising, they just sell handy stuff!). This comes with a selection of popular charging tips which plug into the top of the tube, and should charge most things, but do check before you get one! As you’ll see from the picture there’s a bright blue light to show it’s working. This light is fine in daylight, although in a dark room, say if you’re charging over night, the blinking light can be rather distracting.
The advantage of this thing is that you can buy AA batteries from anywhere, so you are never short of an energy source for your phone. It is slower to charge than USB because it’s charging current is 300 mA, rather than USB’s 500 mA.
I could power mine with any old AA battery, but I choose to use the USBCell, so that I can even top this up from my laptop’s USB ports too!
Update: I have done some further testing with the PowerPal since I originally posted this. I was having some trouble getting as much charge out of it as I expected. Although after eliminating other possible factors I think it must be the electronics of the device itself. I let my Nokia E51 get down to one battery bar, and charged it with the PowerPal using an Energizer Lihtium AA battery. Once the AA was discharged, my E51 was still only showing four bars (out of seven). The E51’s battery is 1000 mAh, so I would have expected to get at least one full charge out of any good quality AA battery.
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May 4
Reviews 6 Comments
64gb, corsair, data, drive, flash, storage, thumb, thumb drive, usb, voyager
Well, I thought it was about time I wrote something new. Seeing as I just got my hands on a new gadget, what better time?!
I have finally got my hands on (by virtue of recently having my birthday!) something I’ve been tempted to get for a long time – this being Corsair’s 64GB Flash Voyager USB thumb drive. So far, this is the largest capacity thumb drive you can get. For me it is ideal, because as I’ve spoke of before on here, I really seek to minimise my data footprint. So while those of you out there may need Terrabytes of storage, for reasons I can only imagine; perhaps you’re archiving the entire internet; I do not need that much storage space. I often trim my files, only keeping things that are worth keeping. As to content, I’m speaking about everything: documents, photos, music, etc. My footprint constantly floats between 42 & 44 gigabytes. So a 64GB drive with no need of cables or moving parts is my perfect back up device.
So, let’s have a look at the thing…
Here’s the packaging, it’s presented fairly simply. There is a box-out on the back containing all the extra paraphernalia. The box is at the top-rear while the you can see the drive is lower-centre on the front. So the packaging could have probably been made smaller. It’s the standard hard plastic pack that you have to completely wreck to extract the contents.
Speaking of paraphernalia, here is everything included in the pack:
If you click on the photo to view it on Flickr, I’ve annotated everything, but here is a short list of the contents:
The drive is encased in rubber which gives it a definite robust feel. The drive itself is also very large for a thumb drive, here’s a picture of it in my hand so you can see:
Because of the size, the USB cable that is supplied is welcome, as it might be too much weight if, say, your laptop’s USB ports aren’t very sturdy. To see what I mean, see how far it sticks out the side of my laptop (particularly note how it dwarfs the dongle of my VX Revolution mouse):
The drive also has a blue indicator light which blinks to show when it is reading or writing (click photo to see annotations):
In everyday use, I am practising what I preach and using Truecyrpt to make sure that the contents are safe from prying eyes. However, this does slow the drive down. In my owns tests, I found that the write speed directly to the drive was almost 10MiB/sec. However, the write speed to the Truecrypt container volume drops down to 4.7MiB/sec.
To back up all of my files, I’ve cranked up the geek-o-meter somewhat by writing a batch file that uses a little known Windows command line tool called “Robocopy“.
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