Saturday, 26 June 2010

Have a Gadgetastic Summer With Weber's On the Grill ($4.99)


By: Andrew Eisner, Director of Community and Content for Retrevo.com


Have a Gadgetastic Summer With Weber's On the Grill ($4.99)

For about the same price of a pound of grass fed hamburger, you can buy this app from Weber for your iPhone or even better, your iPad. The iPhone version has a grill timer and lots of grilling resources like recipes and grocery lists. The iPad version is new and improved and has features like larger images, instructional videos and tips as well as the timer. Have a gadgetastic summer!
About Retrevo
Retrevo.com is one of the largest consumer electronics review and shopping sites in the world, helping people decide what to buy, when to buy, and where to buy. Retrevo uses artificial intelligence to analyze and graphically summarize more than 50 million real-time data points from across the web to give shoppers the most comprehensive, unbiased, up-to-date product information they need to make smart, confident purchasing decisions for electronics.

Sunday, 20 June 2010

iPhone 3Gs Searching / No Service - The most common message on iphone with Orange, O2 and Vodafone

Much as I love my iPhone 3Gs and the features that it offers, it does get incredibly frustrating that the signal strength on the iPhone 3GS is so much worse than other handsets. I understand that this is due to the design of the internal aerial which is small in comparison to other phones. Apple seem to realise the problem as they are billing the 4G as having a better aerial that covers most of the case.

The iphone messages Searching and No Service are the most common ones and appear when there is signal for other phones on the same network.

If you are getting an iPhone 3GS or already have one bear in mind that the network coverage maps that any network supply will not be accurate for the iPhone which is likely to show the No Service/Searching messages in areas of lower signal strength but where other phones can still make or receive calls. A prime example of this was over the weekend when I was out of coverage for several hours. The iPhone 3G was switching between No Service, Searching and low signal during this time but my other Nokia 6233 handset had a consistent one or 2 bars signal during the whole time.

Our other phone a Nokia 6500 on the 3 network also had a constant signal and this was in a built up area so not a remote location away from transmitters.

Wednesday, 16 June 2010

Windows 7 Solitaire Games ActiveX failed to start

I recently upgraded to Windows 7 on one of my PCs but when my wife came to play Solitaire it wouldn't load, giving an ActiveX error. As this was an upgrade from Vista I decided that a clean install of Windows 7 would be a good idea.

However having done this the error persisted so it appeared to be some form of hardware/driver error. Some forum posts appeared to suggest it could be video driver related so I installed the latest nVidia drivers for the onboard video card.

Unfortunately although this improved the situation with the error no longer occurring the Solitaire software would still not run.

SO its back to the drawing board - and back to running good old reliable Windows XP - no problems there and its so much faster!!

Saturday, 12 June 2010

Dell Inspiron 531 AMD Athlon 5000+ Locking up

I've recently had a problem with my Dell Inspiron 531 AMD Athlon 5000+ locking up, the PC boots fine and memory checks all look ok but after about 5 mins the PC locks up and cannot be used. Memory was swapped out, Windows reinstalled, all to no avail.

Everything pointed to a problem with the processor chip overheating but the fan was still running fine. I removed the processor heatsink and fan, added some more themal compound and replaced it.

So far it seems to have done the trick, the PC has not yet locked up and is running well.

iPhone 4G - Battery Life and Signal

The iPhone 4G has now been officially launched and it looks like Apple have taken the comments on the 3GS onboard by addressing the problems with terrible battery life and poor signal on the iPhone 3GS.

I look forward to seeing how the iPhone 4G performs in real life

Friday, 4 June 2010

iPhone 4G Leaked Photos

Some more photos of the iPhone 4G have surfaced. Apparently it is likely to be announced by Steve Jobs in the next few days. Hopefully it will resolve the iPhone No Service problems that have plagued the iPhone 3GS.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7731572/New-secret-iPhone-4G-prototype-discovered-in-Vietnam.html

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

Next Generation iPhone - iPhone 4G found?

A prototype iPhone, the next generation iPhone 4G has been found at a bar in California. Apple have now claimed the phone back from website Gizmondo who had revealed its existence thus proving that it is a genuine iphone under development.

Key features shown on the next generation iPhone 4G are camera with flash, front facing camera and squarer design.

More information on their website http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone