Netflix Windows Phone 7 app now available in the UK

The Netflix Windows Phone 7 app is now available in the UK, allowing users of the movie-streaming service watch their Netflix content on the go on their phone. 

The app, which launched last year in the US on the Microsoft platform, was held back in the UK because of technical differences in the way Netflix delivered films on its service in the US and around the world. 

Following the UK launch of Netflix in January, the company had to re-engineer the Windows Phone 7 app to get it to work with the more advanced system, something it has now resolved.

“We have pushed the App to the Windows Phone Marketplace,” the company told us. “Actual availability for each and every user can take up to 48 hours according to Microsoft.. So on its way imminently.”

We've just checked the WIndows Phone Marketplace online and although it isn't showing up in Marketplace on our Nokia Lumia 800 in the office, it is showing up on the Windowsphone.com website, and it is already there ready to be downloaded. 

Another day, another app ticked for Microsoft. 

Are you planning on downloading the Netflix Windows Phone 7 app in the UK? Let us know how you get on in the comments below.

Vodafone Mobile Wi-Fi R205 device now even faster

Vodafone has upgraded its mobile Wi-Fi device, meaning faster speeds when using your own personal versatile hotspot.

The Mobile Wi-Fi R205 enables users to download, browse the web or check emails remotely without having to rely on 3G. 

Of course you’ll need a Vodafone signal, but the operator promises speeds of up to 21Mbps in most major towns and cities.

So as long as you don’t want to update your Facebook status at the top of Ben Nevis, for example, you should be ok.

Vodafone’s Mobile Wi-Fi device can be connected to up to five different devices simultaneously, be it your mobile phone, tablet, laptop or Sony PlayStaion Vita.

It’s small enough to fit in your pocket, though with only four hours battery life you’ll want to recharge it after heavy use.

For £15 a month on an 18-month contract, the Vodafone Mobile Wi-Fi R205 is available free with 2GB of data each month. 

Alternatively it is also available on pay-as-you-go for £65 when you top up by £10 or more.

To add a little icing on the PAYG cake, customers who go for that option between now and 31 May 2012 can enter an online prize draw where 15 lucky peeps will get their hands on a Wi-Fi Kindle, Nintendo 3DS and Samsung SH100 Digital Camera.

Contract and PAYG customers may also want to download the free Vodafone Mobile Wi-Fi Monitor app to their Android or Apple device, which will help them keep on top of how much data they have used.

Will you be buying the Vodafone Mobile Wi-Fi R205? Let us know what you think.

APP OF THE DAY - Figure review (iPhone)

The smartphone doesn't have to be a serious thing in order for it to be useful. It can be just as handy passing the time helping you mess about as it can checking emails. We like to make sure we get a decent balance between the two. 

Apps like Figure fullfil the need to tap away incessantly at your iPhone screen and generate noise. We advise headphones for this one, but believe us, ten minutes in and any boredom will have been instantly destroyed. 

Figure

FORMAT

iPhone

PRICE

£0.69

WHERE

iTunes

So what exactly is Figure? The closest thing we can compare it to is early music-making games on the Snes, or the clever music bonus game that came with the Game Boy Camera cartridge - which, if you never played it incidentally, was hugely fun. 

In a similar retro style, Figure lets you tap out drums, bass and synth leads, then combine them into one song which ticks over for a few bars. It's not like Garageband, so don't expect to put together huge tracks, more just catchy riffs which can be pieced together instantly. 

You can record, but the emphasis here is on doing things live. Say you want to add another snare into your drum beat for example, you simply hold that icon - removing your finger takes it back out. The whole app works on a slide, swipe or spin approach. You slide to change instruments, swipe to change pitch and spin to change the range and steps of the notes played. It's free form enough to give you plenty of sounds to play with while not being so loose that it requires a lot of practice to master.  

The simplicity of Figure is what makes it worth the download. For 69p it's worth it just for its simple pick up and play approach. Some of the effects are particularly cool and worthy of even the best of electronic music producers. We just wish we could record some of our lengthier train-based jam sessions. 

Like the sound of Figure? Let us know in the comments below ...

Samsung 700G7A GAMER review

Samsung's latest gaming laptop is a monster of a 17-inch machine, with a huge bright screen and a powerful combination of Core i7 and ATI Radeon graphics. It's one of the heaviest laptops we've looked at, weighing in at almost 4Kg, but with plenty of power and a massive HD 3D screen.  

When you lift the glossy plastic lid of this hefty wedge-shaped laptop, it doesn't obstruct the huge cooling vents at the back of the case. That's a good thing, as we discovered the 700G gets quite warm, even when running on battery power and using a balanced profile. A matte metal keyboard surround stops suddenly at the reflective plastic strip that borders the two surprisingly small speaker grilles - which are even more surprising when you finally hear the volume it can put out. There are also a set of bright indicator lights that shine up through the smoky mirrored surface.

Keyboard and trackpad

 

There's a raised wrist rest around the large illuminated trackpad, which, combined with the rake of the wedge-shaped case makes typing on the keyboard surprisingly comfortable. If you couldn’t tell from the design that this is a gaming laptop, you’d guess from the highlighted W,A,S and D keys, ready for you to enter your virtual world of choice. There's plenty of travel on the keyboard, and the size of the machine leaves plenty of room for a full-size numeric keypad. Even so, we did find the keys themselves a little on the small side, and it was a little too easy to hit the wrong key. That's not something you want on a gaming machine, where the wrong key could be the difference between virtual life and virtual death.

A strip of function keys double as system and a basic set of media keys, with F1 also launching Samsung's set up tools. You can use these to adjust the keyboard backlight, as well as tuning the display colour. Oddly there are no play/pause controls, as Samsung seems to believe that gamers don't play music or watch movies.

Perhaps one of the more unusual features is the four position switch on the right of the keyboard, which rotates between different power modes, even switching screen backdrops and keyboard backlight colours when you choose the laptop's gaming mode. The large touch pad is responsive, with a single bar that functions as left and right buttons. It has the usual range of single and multi-touch gestures, including pinch-to-zoom and a three finger swipe to switch between programs.  

Big, beautiful display and surprising sound

We really liked the huge 17.3-inch widescreen HD display. It's bright and clear, with a full HD 1920 by 1080 resolution. 1080p videos were clear and easy on the eye, with no artefacts and plenty of detail. The same was true for 720p movies streamed over a home network, with smooth upscaling.

The built-in Movie Colour Enhancer software turns on automatically when you play a supported format and while we're generally not in favour of tools like this, we were pleasantly surprised by the results, which gave out test 720p video just that little bit more vibrancy and contrast.

The video quality is matched by the audio, with a set of powerful speakers that work well for video, for gaming, and for both local and streamed audio. Two speakers sit behind the keyboard, with a subwoofer on the underside of the case.  

The back edge of the machine isfilled with massive pair of cooling fans, looking like the rear-light cluster of a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. A Blu-ray drive takes up most of the right side, next to the mode dial and two USB 2.0 ports. Power is on the left, with HDMI, Display Port and VGA video ports, so you can connect to just about any screen, plus two USB 3.0 ports and a SD card reader for your camera.

The incredible hulk

 

This isn't a portable laptop, not by a long way. It's not even one for your lap. With a Core i7 processor and a screen this big, it's a desktop replacement. So it wasn't surprising that the battery life wasn't particularly long.

Using our standard tests, mixing streaming and video, on a balanced power setting, we got just an hour of battery. One thing to note is Samsung's Easy Settings tool. In order to preserve battery lifespan (not battery life), it sets the maximum charge to 80 per cent. You'll need to turn Battery Life Extender off to get the most out of your machine if you're planning to use it on the move, but we don’t see this monster travelling that far.  

Samsung has bundled a reasonable selection of software with the 700G. Cyberlink's Media Suite, Microsoft's Live Essentials and Office 2010 Starter are the highlights, with Samsung's own suite of Easy tools giving you all you need to keep your machine tuned just the way you want. 3D support is handled by TriDef's tools, which can upscale existing DVD movies to 3D for viewing with the supplied 3D glasses (if you like that sort of thing).

Verdict

There's a lot to like about the Samsung Series 7 700G, if you overlook its lack of portability and battery life. Like most 17-inch laptops, this is a desktop replacement, with a Core i7 and 8GB of RAM.

It's a hefty machine able to handle the most demanding games and media applications, but where it really excels in its display. Samsung make great LCD panels, and 700G showcases their quality, with a clear, bright display and with the power needed to deliver the media performance that will show off the display. 3D is the cherry on the top.

Review: PressReader brings 2100+ Newspapers Directly to You

The world is moving away from traditional mediums. Fast. Mail have become email. Phone calls have become Skype. And now newspapers are slowly going digital. But going to each newspaper or magazine's website or app can be difficult and inconsistent. That's where PressReader comes in.

PressReader is a multi-platform service that brings over 2100 newspapers and magazines directly to your iPhone. Or any other platform you could think of. PressReader offers apps for Android (Gingerbread or Honycomb), the BlackBerry Playbook, the Apple iPad and iPhone, and both Windows Phone and Windows 7 Slate PC. They also offer apps for both Windows and Mac, as well as legacy versions for both BlackBerry phones and Windows Mobile phones. So, yeah, they've got an app for any device you'll ever use. And all the devices you'll never use. And they're all free apps.

But what exactly does PressReader do? It allows you to subscribe to and read specific newspapers and magazines on your device. They offer over 2100 newspapers from 95 countries and 54 languages. But it's not like they're all newspapers you've never heard of, from countries you've never been to, in languages you have no idea how to read. It's not like that at all. PressReader's got some big name newspapers, like The Washington Post, the Daily Mail, and USA Today, among many others.

Playing with the iOS version of the app, I found it simple and easy to use. It has a nice slider at the bottom of the page, allowing for users to swipe through specific sections of the newspaper. You can attempt to read the newspaper straight, by zooming in on the specific article you're interested in. However, tapping on a headline will bring up the story in an extremely easy-to-read format. Any continuations of the story on a different page will appear there, right below the first half of the story, as a convenience.

The iOS app allows you to print either the screen you are seeing, or the entire page in the newspaper via AirPrint. You can use text-to-speech to listen to your newspaper, and the voices used are surprisingly un-robotic, although they can err on certain things. For example, instead of saying "10 million dollars", when it sees $10M, it would say "10 dollars M".

The service costs $0.99 for a single download of one issue of any newspaper, or $29.95 a month for unlimited downloads. 

Overall, the app seems pretty nice. I found no shortage of reading material, and most of the newspapers I'm interested in were available, including my hometown paper, The Denver Post. The one paper obviously missing is The New York Times.

If you only read a couple newspapers and magazines regularly, checking to see if they have individual apps might be a good idea, as they'll be more personalized and work better with that specific paper than PressReader. However, if you read many papers regularly, or even if you just want to be able to look up an article any time someone mentions one, PressReader is a definite download.

$0.99 is not too bad for a single issue, but buying that every day might be a bit expensive. $29.95 a month is pretty expensive, and while it may be worth it if you're subscribing to many newspapers or magazines, if you just want to subscribe to one or two, it's probably too expensive. It'd be nice if there was some sort of middle ground where one could subscribe to one or two newspapers for something less than $30 a month, and more affordable than buying each issue for $0.99.

PressReader is a great service overall, there are a few flaws, but if you can get past them, PressReader could be a great way to digitize your newspapers, slowly shy away from paper, and simplify your newspaper and magazine consumption.

Google adds App Search

A new option has recently appeared in Google searches, called Applications. When clicked, it searches for the query searched, but looks specifically for apps, searching sites like Apple.com (for iOS apps), Google.com (for Android apps), CNET.com, and more. You can choose from a few sites to search specifically, as to find certain apps that may be compatible with your device, or apps from a site you specifically trust.

A  full-size screenshot of the new feature in action can be seen here.

Instagram finally available for Android

Instagram, the extremely popular photo sharing app, has finally been released on Android. As we reported earlier, the Android version of this popular app has been in the making for a while, but hit Google Play (formerly known as the Android Market. Confusing, right?) today. 

This app brings the same photo-sharing functionality as the iOS version did. It allows you to take or import a photo, a cool retro filters, and share it out for the world to see. 

The app has been so popular, in fact, that Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram, said that it had been logging 2,000 new sign-ups a minute. Not bad.

The app can be downloaded for free from Google Play here. More information can be found at instagram.com.

Will you be downloading the free new Android app? Why or why not? Answer in the comments.