Android App of the Week: Winamp

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

The Android Market’s brimming with media management apps but, until this week, I hadn’t been entirely convinced by many: GrooveShark proved buggy, Last.fm seemed slow and kept churning out the same tunes, and others are hampered with fiddly user interfaces.

WinAmp, though, is a name I trust, having used it for years on desktops – and now that it’s arrived on Android, albeit in beta form, I had to give it a go.

It certainly makes a good first impression. It’s styled after the desktop version, and the UI is clean and simple – a breath of fresh air when so many apps try to cram as much information on screen as possible.

Instead, the bottom of the screen offers play/pause and previous/next track controls that remain persistent across every screen in the application. If you’d like more information, though, simply swipe upwards to open a larger tab, which contains the song’s name, album art, repeat and shuffle settings and a link to the song queue. You can also press the song’s name to search for it on YouTube or Google and, if you’ve got the app installed, scrobble the track with Last.fm. (more…)

Nvidia Ion netbooks: first look

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

The first Ion-based netbooks are beginning to trickle in, so yesterday Nvidia took the opportunity to introduce the technology to us formally. And if there was any doubt as to the focus of the demo, it was quickly made clear by the presence of a gigantic 1080p Sharp Aquos TV with a tiny netbook attached.

The netbook in question was HP’s Mini 311, announced today, and it offers a very similar core spec to others we’ve already seen from the likes of Samsung. The usual 1.6GHz Atom N270 and 2GB of RAM are joined by an 11.6in 1,366 x 768 LED screen and that shiny new Nvidia Ion GPU, which also allows manufacturers to include an HDMI port for hooking up to an HD TV. The Mini 311 is pencilled in for a £349 launch price, which is actually a rather competitive price for its size and spec. (more…)