BottleMate - it really works. Get a load of this video to see how the thing works. It’s simple but effective!

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It’s been a long time between posts here at Gadget User Blog. The year has been very busy and just gets busier. However, it’s time to pause and post one review that I’m sure you’ll be interested in. It’s my take on the new HTC Hero Android phone. It’s been one that I’ve been waiting to get my hands on for some time. Finally I have managed to get a hold of one so here are my first impressions.

The first impression is ‘Wow’. This is a seriously substantial device. It feels solid in your hand. The build feels good and the packaging isn’t over the top, rather it’s trying to keep a small footprint.

Once you’ve unboxed it and turned the device on you’re confronted with a wonderfully bright screen and a large digital clock to welcome you to the world of the Hero. The next thing you notice is the extended home screen. A swipe of the finger across the screen takes you from left to right and to other widgets. Now widgets are the next big thing in mobile devices. They are  shortcuts to application data but without the need for opening the applications. The device is preset with the weather widgets, email and SMS messaging widgets, and a host of others. Widgets are really a great idea and make using the device very simple.

HTC has provided  a new interface for the Hero. They call it Sense UI. It’s based on a simple concept that tries to gather information about your friends from a number of sources in the one place. It works extremely well. One thing I loved was that you can link with your Facebook account and it will download your contacts images. That way you can see photos of your contacts against their name – very neat. But that’s not all, it also links to their Flickr accounts too so you can view their albums.

This is smart content aggregation that revolves around your friends. Your friends’ Facebook and Flickr activity is drawn into their profile in the ‘People’ application. This is a very neat solution to keeping up with the volume of information available about our contacts from the various social media sites.

By the way, did I mention that this is a phone? Call quality is good and it has all your normal functions. But the phone is not the star in this unit. It’s all the other bits and pieces.

You have a 5 megapixel camera. The camera’s quality is pretty good. But remember, it’s a camera in a phone so don’t think you’re going to get the quality of a dedicated digital camera. The camera can also capture moving images through video – again quality isn’t fabulous but in an emergency it could be very handy.

I did read a very negative review about the Hero last week – can’t remember where – but it the review was bemoaning the speed and responsiveness of the user interface on this device. Well, I haven’t noticed any major problems in that regard. I’m not sure what the reviewer was talking about but from my perspective the Hero is terrific on this front. I have a sneaking suspicion the review was an iPhone fanatic who was perhaps a little worried by what Hero and Android were offering.

I’ve found it to be no more or less responsive and smooth in its transitions than the iPhone. Applications open in reasonable time and functions and connection to the internet are all good. I’ve only used the phone’s wi-fi connection for internet functions so I’m yet to test it over the mobile network (I need to extricate myself from the Blackberry service on my previous phone). There is no Blackberry Connect at this time although rumour has it that it’s on the way.

But, given that the internet browser is so excellent, I’m seriously considering not worrying about Blackberry and just using webmail instead. I’m not a high volume email user on a mobile device but if you are you’ll probably want to hang on to the Blackberry or wait until the BC rumour is confirmed with actual software!

Text entry is okay. The screen-based text entry system takes some getting used to so again, if you are wanting to use the phone for document editing I’d be cautious. But for texts and emails the text function should suffice – although I recommend using it in the landscape mode rather than in portrait.

So my first impression of this phone is positive on all fronts. If you have thought about getting a Hero from HTC I think you can be fairly sure the phone will meet you expectations.

Note: Specifications are subject to change without prior notice.

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So, I thought it might be useful to update on my progress with the Bebook. I have finished one novel on the device and I’m happy to report that it is a comfortable device to work with. Reading is easy, navigating is easy. In fact when you have to put the book down, whether you like it or not (!), you don’t lose your place. There’s no fumbling with bookmarks or worries about losing your page. You simply close the book and open it again when you’re ready to pick up where you left off. Simple. If you want to read something else for a while, the device remembers where you were in your previous book. You don’t need to find your page again, the device remembers it for you.

This makes picking up from where you left off to reading a simple and pleasurable task. In fact, you get back to reading with a minimum of fuss.

I’ve been reading on the bus, at lunchtime and in the evening before sleeping. The Bebook is great for all of these situations. A crowded bus is probably where the Bebook comes into its own. No fumbling with pages. You can read one-handed – one had with the Bebook and one hand holding onto the rails – something you need to do with Sydney’s bus drivers!

The Bebook has only crashed twice in the week. Not really sure why but a simple reset solves the problem. This interrupts your reading for about two minutes. All in all the Linux-based operating system is pretty robust.

If there is only one complaint it’s that the screen background is not a little whiter. I’ve found that reading by lamplight, such as reading in bed, can be a little difficult. The text appears a bit dim. The flip side of this is that in bright light or sunlight reading the Bebook is just fantastic. The text is crisp and easy to read. I guess it’s difficult making the screen look perfect in every light situation.

I may well get a purpose designed reading lamp to use for bed side reading.

Today I downloaded two new books to read and I can’t wait to get started on them. Downloading books has proved to be quite easy. I’m using DRM books with the Mobipocket format. It seems to work okay. There isn’t a huge selection of book in Australia but Dymocks sells on line and I’ve purchased some from eBooks.com.

If you’re thinking about getting a Bebook I’m pleased to say that week two of owning it is not making me regret the decision one bit. In fact I’m looking forward to more reading with it. Plus I’m saving on the purchase price of hard copy books. I’ve already saved about $35 with my first purchases.

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Bebook. Ordinary name but a most un-ordinary product. I received my Bebook last week and have been playing around for a few days with this intriguing device. Intriguing? Well maybe not in terms of its technical application and sophistication, but intriguing because of what it portends for the future of books and reading.

Why did I choose the Bebook as the first to review. Mainly the price. At AU$400 this is at a price point that the poorer geeks among us would be willing to pay. Competitors such as the Iliad and Sony’s offerings are priced seriously higher.

So what of the Bebook?The Bebook is delivered express post from Europe. It took about two days for mine to arrive. It comes in a neat package no larger that an A5 novel.  In the box is the device itself, a battery, a usb cord, headphones and instruction manual.

The Bebook itself sits within a leather cover and is light yet reasonably solid to the touch. It needs to be charged before use and you must do this via the usb cord plugged into your computer. In fact that’s the only way of charging the device short of using an (optional) adapter to plug in to the mains electricity. But to be honest, the charge of the device lasts so long that this isn’t really going to be an issue – this is not a device that you’ll need to charge every day or even every week. I’ve gone all week with the device and the indicator is still showing that it’s fully charged.

It has a fairly simple layout of buttons that works pretty well and enables you to navigate through the device easily. Most menu functions and files are only a few clicks away. On the left hand side of the book are the two arrow page turning buttons – these buttons are repeated at the bottom right of the device just near the OK and ‘Return’ buttons.

The navigation menu is reasonably intuitive and after a few uses you’ll be able to find your way around the device quickly.

At the bottom of the device are the usb and headphone jack, on the side of the device are two volume buttons and on top of the device is the master switch and the slot for an SD card.

The screen uses the new Vizplex E-ink film and is a really good resolutions. It is easy to read in most lighting conditions. What is amazing about the technology is that you can still see the image clearly in strong light or direct sunlight. In fact, the screen looks better when there is more light, such as under flourescent lights in an office situation or outside. My only concern is that in dimmer lighting situations the contrast between the ‘paper’ and the text is perhaps not as great as it could be.

This isn’t a huge problem and it can be easily be fixed by increasing the font size of whatever you’re reading. But with a good reading light the Bebook is great.

Part of the attraction of the Bebook was the range of formats that it will read. These include pdf, mobi, prc, epub, lit, txt, fb2, doc, html, rtf, djvu, wol, ppt, mbp, chm, bmp, jpg, png, gif, tif, rar, zip, and mp3. I have to confess I haven’t tried all of these  but pdf, mobi, lit and text all render very well.

It also reads fb2 files, which are a new open source ebook format. While there still isn’t a lot of books around in this format those that have been converted render extremely well using this format but I have to say the proprietory Mobipocket reader renders pretty well.

So all in all I’m enjoying the Bebook experience. If you want a reasonably priced ebook then give it a look.

Stay tuned for more updates as I continue to use this device.

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Having installed Windows 7, I was keen to see whether the speech recognition function had improved.  I’m happy to report that the speech recognition function has indeed improved.  In fact I’m writing this post using the speech recognition function and I have to say from my perspective its accuracy and ease of use are greatly improved.

It works fairly well with Internet Explorer but I’m afraid to say that speech recognition works not at all with Firefox, which is disappointing but I suppose hardly surprising.  Voice recognition is probably a pretty complex thing!

What is noticeable is that the speech recognition seems to have improved enormously in its accuracy (of course having said that, it took me four or five goes to get “in its accuracy” right - oh the delicious irony). But apart from that I think the potential benefits of speech recognition are terrific.  It does seem that the ambient noise problem of earlier versions seem to have been somewhat overcome and this version is picking up very well on vocal signals rather than background noise.

The odd bit of traffic noise in the background will still make my speech recognition system think I have said something but rather than insert a word it will simply ask the question, “what did you say?”.  This is a much better solution than inserting gobbledigook.

But frankly, I never really had the time or patience to stick with speech recognition because even for this simple article I’ve probably spent about half an hour longer than I normally would have trying to correct all the mistakes that the speech recognition system has made.  One suspects that speech recognition is a little bit like typing in that you really need to train and then keep practicing regularly to really see results in accuracy and ease of use.

I’ve always thought speech recognition would be useful if if you suffer from RSI or some other injury that left you unable to type.  If you really needed to use it then you would have the patients to train and get it right.  But for me, for now, speech recognition seems to take longer than typing. I suppose if you’re willing to invest the time and effort then you may find that speech recognition holds the promise of easy navigation and simple and accurate text manipulation/editing it has always promoted.

And one more thing before I go, speech recognition in Windows 7does seem to be on a par with other software packages such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, which as you probably know, come at a premium in terms of price.

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Here’s a nifty solution to the clutter of chargers and wires that you can end up with if you have numerous devices all needing charging. The Bluetek multicharger can alleviate some of these problems for owners of particular devices.

It’s important to note this is a multicharger not a universal charger. So it will be compatible with some devices but not all. It works with iPod, iPhone and iTouch, Blackberry, Nokia mobile phones, Nintendo DS Lite, Sony PSP and with selected digital cameras and GPS units. However, the last non-branded list will be more luck that anything else.

However if you have a range of devices from the branded list then you may just find that the multicharger is a useful addition to your collection to reduce charger clutter. They neat this about the Bluetek multicharger is that it can charge five devices at once all from one power outlet.

So if you are an Apple device person, own a Blackberry or Nokia phone and a personal game device then this may well be the perfect device for you. Or if you lost a charger and were looking for a replacement then this is worth a look. It retails at around AU$50.

If you don’t own the listed devices then you’ll need to check the connectors to make sure they will fit with your device.

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If you have more than one Twitter account then hootsuite is a service that deserves a closer look. It enables you to set up mulitple accounts and tweet to those accounts in one go. hootsuite also enable users to have multiple logins to one Twitter account, meaning that you can have more than one editor for your tweets without having to use the same login.

You can manage users access to Twitter accounts and their role. It really is a neat idea. There is not much more to tell about this resource. It does what they say it will do and it does easily and with a minimum of fuss.

I guess at some stage they will start charging people for the service but at the moment it’s in beta and so its free. Get in early from some hootsuiting sweetness.

Give it a try at hootsuite.

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I’ve been looking at Twitter in more detail of late and you’ll see on this site some recent additions that take advantage of this technology.

Now you don’t need to have a browser open to keep up to date with the tweets that you’ve been following. twhirl is a program developed using Adobe AIR that you download onto your desktop (you’ll need to install Adobe AIR first) and they use to follow your favourite Twitterers or your favourite Twitter searches. You can also follow some other services like Twitter using this tool, although it doesn’t aggregate them – you’ll need a separate window for each one.

This tool is particularly useful if you like following live micro-blogging surrouding a particular issue or world event. Recently WEEver was following G20 developments on Worst Episode Ever and if you visit you’ll see it arranged through another neat tool called ScribbleLive.

twhirl gives you this functionality right on your desktop. It also has another great feature that sldes up tweets onto your desktop when the twhirl window is not showing – so you can keep up to date with tweets while you’re doing something else – that’s called multi-tasking or distracting depending on your point of view!

I think twhirl is a very good looking tool, well laid out and easy to use. If you are already familiar with Twitter I think you’ll find it a most useful interface. There are a number of other tools out there that I’ve tried but none were quite as intuitive and simple to use as twhirl.

If you wanted to aggregate a number of social networking sites and tools then twhirl isn’t probably what you’d choose, but if you rely on Twitter as your main tool then I think you should have a look at twhirl.

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Well, the world of wireless N and gigabit LAN was too much of a temptation. But at this price it wasn’t going to break the bank to give it a try. I had never heard of Edimax before today. But I have to say, the ease of set up shows just how far wireless technology and home networking have come in the last few years.

I had the whole thing up and running in less that half an hour. It easily plugged into the ADSL modem and the wired connection to the internet was working in a flash. In a few seconds later I had set up a WPA key and had secure wireless access for my laptop. Windows 7 found the router in a flash – in fact I used the SSID and password from the old wireless set up and the laptop found it all by itself.

The unit was purchased for $145, which makes it one of the cheapest gigabit wireless routers on the market as far as I can tell.

The wireless laptops in the network certainly seem to be loading pages a little faster even though my laptop doesn’t have a N wireless card – sadly, still using G. But the signal from the router is strong and it seems stable. I’m looking forward to joining together some network attached storage and the desktop at gigabit speeds so that moving large files will be pretty quick.

I haven’t tried streaming media across the wireless network yet but I’ll let you know whether there is any improvement on that front when I have a moment to try it.

So this is very much a first couple of hours review. I’ll update this shortly with some more detail.

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Well, I’ve been using Windows 7 for some weeks now and thought that it was probably worth updating my original review. Overall I have to admit that the experience of Windows 7 remains positive.

The tablet PC function with Windows 7 does not seem to be too crash hot – but that is probably driver conflict issues with ASUS – you can use the pen on the screen but the R1F doesn’t detect when it is in tablet mode or notebook mode.

As don’t use tablet mode very much this isn’t a huge problem for me.

I am still impressed at the speed with which it boots up. I have put most of my favourite programs on the system and it doesn’t seem to be making too much of a difference. In Vista the whole laptop almost ground to a halt at boot up. But this seems to be going okay.

The overall speed of the system is reasonably good and a marked improvement on Vista. I haven’t suffered any crashes of the system, no freezing up. And occasionally a program will stop working – you can shut that program down without too much hassle and Windows 7 just keeps going.

Wireless and bluetooth seem to work fine. With the advent of the new version of Skype and Windows 7 I can finally use my bluetooth headphones as a headset for voice calls. This worked straight off the bat – with Vista it took a long time of fiddling around and testing to get the headset to work for one minute.

I’m getting used to all the different ways to interact with items on the desktop and whilst running programs – finding the shortcuts to doing things. This is kind of neat and there is always something else to discover by accident. I think this is a nice way of making the experience a discovery  – although I imagine some folk will just hate it.

All in all I’m pleased to report that the experience is so far still superior to Vista. I won’t be going back. Windows 7 has sold me on that front.

I’ll keep ‘betaing’ away with Windows 7 but I reckon its an OS that Microsoft users can rightly be looking forward to – especially if you’ve been lumped with a Vista system.

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