Google Now draining iPhone battery

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

Google Now was added to the Google Search app for iPhone and iPad earlier this week, and already appears to have infuriated many users with excessive battery drain.

Google Now provides a series of cards that deliver location-based data, such as how long it will take you to get home from your current location, local restaurant reviews, and how far you’ve walked this week. This obviously requires the app to make use of the iPhone’s GPS chip, and users of the app may have noticed that the GPS notification icon is now almost permanently displayed in the status bar at the top of the home screen.

GPS is one of the more battery-intensive tasks on a phone. Anyone who’s used a satnav app, such as TomTom, will attest how quickly the battery drains when the GPS is in constant use.

(more…)

The government website that doesn’t work with IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Macs or smartphones

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013

Remember how, late last year, the Government promised to start getting its websites in order? Best it pays a visit to the Department of Work and Pensions site.

There you’ll find an e-service that allegedly allows you to claim for Attendance Allowance, Disability Living Allowance and the Overseas State Pension. But only if you have a computer that hasn’t been updated since about 2005.

For if you click on the What Do I Need? section, you’ll find a fairly exhaustive list of the operating systems, browsers and – unforgivably, given this is a site for claiming disability benefits – screen readers with which the site doesn’t work properly. These include:

(more…)

Silly Microsoft, that’s not a Start button

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

Rumours that Microsoft is bringing the Start button back to Windows 8 have been gathering pace over the past week or so. Don’t get your hopes up, however.

The Verge’s Tom Warren, as reliable a Microsoft-watcher as they come, has been told by his Redmond sources that Windows 8.1 will indeed include a Start button on the desktop – but this will merely send people back to the Metro Start screen. It isn’t a return of the cascading Start menu and search bar that appears when you click on the Start button in Windows 7.

If true, it’s yet another indication that Microsoft just doesn’t get it. The people clamouring for the return of the Start button don’t want just another shortcut to the Start screen – they can get there easily enough by pressing the Windows button or using the Start button charm. What they want is the convenience of being able to open and search for applications, files or settings without being thrust into the touch-optimised Metroverse.

It looks like those PC makers who are preinstalling third-party Start buttons on their machines are going to get no respite.

What are the acceptable limits of “unlimited” internet?

Thursday, April 18th, 2013

For years we’ve argued against the sheer ridiculousness of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) allowing fixed and mobile ISPs to advertise services with stated limits as “unlimited”. Recently, the ASA has upheld complaints against both Virgin Media and T-Mobile when advertising “unlimited” services, claiming that the limits they imposed went beyond the permitted “moderate restrictions”.

The networks have told us that they’re confused about what they can and can’t advertise as “unlimited”; broadband customers are confused; we’re confused. So we asked the ASA to define exactly what counts as a “moderate restriction”. It sent us the text of a Help Note, that’s designed to clear this all up:

(more…)

Windows 8 sparking little more search interest than Vista

Monday, April 15th, 2013

There’s a lot of debate over the popularity of Windows 8. Microsoft claims Windows 8 is outselling Windows 7; British desktop PC makers have told us that up to 93% of new PC buyers still want Windows 7.

Google provides us with another means of divining the popularity of different products. The Google Trends website allows you to compare the search volumes of different terms, and it doesn’t make particularly pleasant reading for Microsoft when you start comparing recent versions of Windows.

We compared the search volumes for the past four editions of Windows, from 2004 until the present day, and this is the result (click graph to enlarge):

As you can see, Windows 8 is following a very similar trend line to Windows Vista, briefly bursting past the incumbent version of Windows at the time of launch, before settling down at a level that’s well below its predecessor. While the post-launch drop-off isn’t quite as severe for Windows 8 as it was for Vista, it’s still pretty grim viewing for Microsoft.

If there are crumbs of comfort for Microsoft, searches for OS X appear to be in long-term decline — although we suspect more people search for the particular version number than “OS X”:

Indeed, when you throw the search term “Mac” into the comparison, it paints an entirely different picture:

Ken Livingstone invented broadband in 1983

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

OK, he didn’t. Just like Al Gore never really claimed to invent the internet in that infamous 1999 interview. However, the former London Mayor did claim that he was lobbying for broadband connections as far back as 1983 – roughly 15 years before broadband was even heard of.

The staggering claim was made in a discussion of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy on last night’s Newsnight (fast forward to around 43 mins), and made me laugh so loud I fear I may have woken the former Prime Minister up. The conversation turned to Thatcher’s privatisation of BT in the early 1980s, which Ken – then leader of now-disbanded Greater London Council – vigorously opposed.

“What I was saying in 1983 was you should have a broadband system in Britain and you needed a state corporation to do that,” Ken stated on Newsnight. “We could have been the leading figures in that. That was in 1983… We missed a great opportunity. We could have had Microsoft and all the great internet opportunities in this country.”

(more…)

How to record a Skype call for free

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

Recording a Skype call is much easier than recording a regular telephone conversation, which requires a Dictaphone and specialist equipment. Better still, you can do it for free.

For this method, you’ll need to install the Skype Windows desktop client (the Windows 8 app won’t work), and a piece of free software called MP3 Skype Recorder.

If you install both these pieces of software at the same time, you may need to restart your PC before MP3 Skype Recorder recognises the Skype installation. When you first open MP3 Skype Recorder you’ll also have to click in a pop-up in the Skype client, giving the app permission to access Skype.

(more…)

How to move from iPhone to Android

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

For the past three years – since the launch of the iPhone 3GS – I’ve been firmly in the iOS camp. For the past week, however, I’ve been testing the HTC One (you can read my verdict on the device in our HTC One review).

Making the move from iOS to Android was a damned-sight less painful than I anticipated. Within a matter of minutes, I had all of my contacts, music and other data transferred or accessible from the HTC One.

If you’re thinking about making the move from iPhone to Android, here’s how to make the transition as easy as possible.

(more…)

Flipboard 2.0: we’re all magazine editors now

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

I used to be a heavy user of Flipboard, an innovative iOS/Android app that turned your Twitter, Facebook and other news feeds into a stylish, flickable magazine-style format.

In recent months, I’ve edged away from Flipboard in favour of semi-rival Zite, largely because it was better at anticipating content from other sources that I might want to read, instead of merely sprucing up the presentation of my existing feeds.

However, a feature in the newly released Flipboard 2.0 has piqued my personal and professional interest in the app once more. Flipboard now allows users to become their own magazine editors (yes, I can feel that noose tightening around my neck), selecting content from different sources and presenting it in their own bespoke titles.

(more…)

Windows Phone 8 support and the deafening FUD

Monday, March 18th, 2013

Some websites appear to be using the Excel Web App to help them write their stories on the revelation that Microsoft plans to stop supporting Windows Phone 8 in less than two years’ time, putting two and two together and coming up with five.

The incriminating evidence, dredged up from a nether region of the Microsoft Support site, shows that support for Windows Phone 8 is due to expire on 8 July 2014 – less than 18 months from now and (oddly, at first appearance) before support for Windows Phone 7.8 expires in September 2014.

Some of our more excitable colleagues at rival publications (I shan’t name them, they don’t deserve the Google juice) have suggested that this means Microsoft is yanking the carpet from underneath Windows Phone buyers again, and that customers who buy a Windows Phone today will be using an unsupported OS by the time their two-year contract expires.

(more…)