What started first at around 900 BST was finally put to an end after Orange took charge and got the problem fixed. On Thursday many broadband customers faced a sudden blackout which continued on for a few hours. A few blackberry users couldn’t access their emails as well and some of the other customers could not access the internet earlier during the day. According to the officials at Orange this took place because of some wreckage of critical cables. Many customers complained that it was quiet goofy for such a huge company which has around 1 million broadband customers in U.K to be hit by such a problem. However the officials at Orange haven’t clearly mentioned the root cause of the problem but they were quick enough to retort that the problem was fixed within a few hours of it being identified.

Off late, Orange mobile also announced that it would be merging its U.K business with T-mobile.

Zune HD which is going to be launched on September 15th will be an only U.S release. According to insiders from Microsoft, there are no plans to launch the Zune anywhere outside the U.S. The launch is going to be stateside atleast for the time being. There are also plans to launch the Zune video, a video download software in around 18 markets. Even when the Zune HD was not even named there were rumours that the new hardware would be international. But looking at the way things are taking shape at the moment, that seems unlikely. For those with a strong memory the older zune didn’t see a launch beyond Canada which took place almost two years after its launch in the U.S.

Well, the only reason I see behind this is that probably the people at Microsoft want to test the Zune on a small ground and then take the launch ahead if it is successful. Well all I hope is that this one does well, and we get to see an overseas launch soon.

The thing that HTC is bragging about with the launch of this one is the Sense UI, and it has enough reason to do so I feel, because its just brilliant. This one is like the fourth android phone from HTC and starting from three home screens, with this one it has moved up to seven home screens including the main home screen which can be accessed from anywhere by just hitting on the home button and with three to the left and the right of the screen respectively. HTC has also taken the TouchFlo3D interface and based its new Sense UI into it. This means that not only does thee user get different home screens there also a slider bar below a few applications to scroll through the pages. This one comes with a 528mhz processor, which isn’t exactly fit for the kind of multitasking that the HTC hero is expected too provide the user with. I also noticed some lag at different intervals and I guess this has to do with the underpowered processor. I just hope that HTC looks into this soon. Switching  [...]

This one from BOSE comes in after the QuiteComfort 2 and the QuiteComfort 3 and surely makes the best even more better. This time BOSE has tried to reinvent its own baby, the noise cancellation feature, to probably punch the ones who tried to copy its invention like Creative and Sennheiser right in the face… and surely this ones going to hurt bad. BOSE has left no stone unturned in making this one an absolute masterpiece. As far as the designing is concerned this almost looks familiar to the QC 2 with hardly any difference. BOSE sticks to its iconic design with the over the ear design with earcups which can easily be swiveled around and put into the elegant case that comes along with it. With the headphones in it, the case hardly becomes any thicker than a CD case. And just for the convenience of frequent travelers this comes along with a "high/low" switch. Though in the QC2’s even when the noise cancellation feature engaged, they had soft cushions which protected the users ears  [...]

This one offers dual-mode functionality which means GSM and CDMA together. When using within the country it works on the CDMA network aand while on roaming it works on the GSM network. While on roaming Sprint offers voice coverage in 180 countries and Data coverage in 150 countries. The other functionality that the Sprint mobile offers are HTC's Straight Talk Technology, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition. Navigation through the Windows has been made more easier with the TouchFlo 3D interface. There are also a few other tabs that Sprint has added too make navigation easy. In my opinion the TouchFlo 3D interface is what has to be looked forward to. Its got a 3.2 megapixel camera which has five resolution modes along with four quality settings. The only glitch here is that it doesn’t offer flash, though to make up for it there are several brightness control settings. The video mode supports video capturing in any of the four formats i.e. H.263, 3GPP2,  [...]

The audio quality was pretty decent enough displaying comfortable amounts of highs and lows and the audio had a very deep feeling to it. Although I guess the speakers could benefit if they had a higher maximum volume range. The inbuilt 1.3 megapixel webcam offers some good visuals and video qualities. Using it while chatting with friends, they said that the visuals were pretty much clear but they complained about some slight motion distortion when we moved. The videos and the images can be edited and enhanced by using the LifeFrame software. Thanks to its 2.1-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 CPU this one performed quite decently in our overall system performance test. It loaded Windows and the other menus within no seconds but it took some time to for the media player menus to open. ‘zombie’ by Cranberries almost took like 9.1 secs to load fully. The 5,400-rpm, 320GB hard drive managed to duplicate a 4.7 GB media folder at a rate of almost 19.1 MBps. It took like 1 min and 2 secs  [...]

Though Samsung has compromised on quite a few features with this one it has retained the TouchWiz UI like in the others from the Tocco family and the Jet. The interface can easily be managed by swiping the finger over the screen. This one being more of a resistive display, doesnot have the smart multi-touch feature. The 3 buttons on the standby screen are for stimulating the numberpad, the contact book and the main menu. The numbers on the numberpad have been comfortably placed to avoid any mispresses and it well quite succeeds in achieving this. The phonebook can be used to find a number in three ways. Either swiping down through the whole list or directly typing the name on the search bar. The other option that it offers is searching through sections letter by letter. It also has an option of photo contacts, using which all your recent contacts photos will pop up on the screen in a grid like fashion and all you have to do is click on the photo to make a call. Coming to messaging…  [...]

Lead guitarist of Radiohead, Ed O’Brien voiced his displeasure over the government’s decision to bring illegal downloading to an end. This doesn’t come in as much of a surprise because most of the members of the Featured Artists Coalition have the same to say. According to O’Brien, this move by the government will do nothing much than creating a rift between music and music fans. Plus he also added that file sharers will continue doing it by hook or by crook irrespective of the steps that the government plans to take in this direction. He also cited the example of a friend of his who has been sharing music files for more than six years without paying a single penny for the music. This opinion is being strongly echoed throughout the Featured Artists Coalition with almost everyone being against this move. According to another member of the FAC, Dave Rowntree (drummer of blur) it would just add up to making enemies of their  [...]

With all the blabbering about its looks over, I must add this one for sure is an invention that could send almost anyone drooling over the absolute spectacle the makers have come up with as far the engineering is concerned. I seriously don’t know from where to start with just because of the fact that almost everything has been so perfectly done that it is almost difficult to write an unbiased review. There is no sign of discontinuity between the bass, the mid band and treble. Almost each one starts off from where the last one left which is in itself quite commendable. the performance is absolutely a seamless which not many of Magico’s competitors can boast of. Amongst all the tweeters, the Relevator tweeter to be precise is quite different and a far superior one as compared to the earlier version  of the same model. Hmm.. coming back to the question framed earlier… is balance lean?? Well the answer is not exactly… just a little bit. But  [...]

Trust the blabbermouths at Microsoft to deliver us with goodies time and again. This time though the goodies came through via twitter with a few engineers from Microsoft leaking out the news that Microsoft Bing 2.0 would soon be launched and if the rumors doing the rounds are to be believed the launch would happen this month itself.

The brand-new version of the Bing promises to come up with new exciting features using which you could see maps or pictures of the neighbourhood or probably the restaurant that you want to try out. Probably this one could be Microsoft’s best step to compete with Google’s high end map facilities. And possibly this one would also include the merger of the Silverlight streaming media technology with the Maps and the photos. However, most probably U.K will not see the launch of this version so soon because it is still toying around with the features of the Beta version.