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Apple AirPlay: on show in Manchester tomorrow
Advent Vega budget tablet: video primer
iPhone germ factory! Smartphones carry more bacteria than your toilet?!
Best Android games
iRobot Packbot gallery: Xbox 360 controller goes to war
Lexmark puts Facebook and Twitter in your printer, purpose unknown
Nintendo DS patent will make shopping more exciting
Get Angry Birds Android free!
Nokia E7 vs HTC Desire Z: clash of the QWERTYs!
Samsung Galaxy S Froyo update: T-Mobile delay!

Apple AirPlay: on show in Manchester tomorrow

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 09:33 AM PDT

Apple AirPlay will be on show at the Home Entertainment show in Manchester tomorrow, where there’ll also be a bunch of 3D TV demos to inspect. AirPlay streams music around your house, as well as from iPads, iPhones and iPod touch. Tomorrow will be the first demo in the whole of the UK, as Denon brings a specially updated AVR 3311 AV receiver to Manchester, complete with AirPlay features, so if you’re around it might be worth checking out. Tickets are £6 on the door, and the show is on all weekend.

16 & 17 Oct | £6 | Renaissance Hotel, Manchester

Advent Vega budget tablet: video primer

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 09:09 AM PDT

We were surprised by the Advent Vega budget Android tablet we saw at the beginning of the week, which only costs £250. It runs Froyo, has a good 10.1″ screen, and is quick and responsive. We asked Adam Lockyer, the category manager to talk us through the Advent Vega. Click through for the video…

The Advent Vega has impressive battery life, but it does lack 3G, which means it does not have the Android app marketplace. However, it will be getting an Advent marketplace which, quite surprisingly, has 5,000 apps available. The other option though, is to wait until next year when a 3G model will be coming out.

What do you think about the Advent Vega? Want one, or will you wait till a 3G model turns up with the Android marketplace next year?

iPhone germ factory! Smartphones carry more bacteria than your toilet?!

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 09:02 AM PDT

Your iPhone is a germ magnet according to a study published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology. Apple's beauty isn't alone in its bacteria friendly status though, mobile phones in general are apparently right little germ factories. The researchers found that mobile phones can harbour 18x more bacteria than the flush on a loo in public toilet…

Timothy Julian, the author of the study, says: "If you put virus on a surface, like an iPhone, about 30% of it will get on your fingertips…a fair amount of it may go from your fingers to your eyes, mouth or nose." Julian doesn't provide figures for just how much this matters. Are our mobiles making us sick? Probably no more than any other object we handle a lot.

But the study did get us wondering: are you a gadget cleaning obsessive always ready with an anti-bacterial wipe to give your HTC Desire a wipe down or spritz your Samsung Galaxy S? Or are your gadgets in a shockingly dirty state. Hit the comments for enter the gadget confessional…

Out now | £429 | Apple (via The Sacramento Bee)

Best Android games

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 08:56 AM PDT

Want the best Android games for your Google phone? You’ve come to the right place. The Android Market isn’t exactly a welcome virtual mall for browsing and discovering rather than buying what you want, so we’ve made things easier by picking out the finest time wasters for your commute. See the full Best Android games Top 5 to the right of this full post.

Roll on over to the right hand side of the page and you’ll see our Best Android games Top 5, complete with links to jump straight through to the developer’s official site.

These are the very best Android games our Electricpig gaming and mobile experts just can’t put down, and keep coming back to time and time again. We update the list regularly, so the next time the next Angry Birds-esque sensation lands on Google’s mobile OS, you can be sure you’ll see it here pretty promptly – so long as it’s worthy of being in our Best Android games Top 5, of course.

What do you make of our best Android games shortlist? Any crucial missing entries? Let us know what in the comments below!

iRobot Packbot gallery: Xbox 360 controller goes to war

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 08:00 AM PDT

The iRobot Packbot is a military robot from the makers of the robot vacuum Roomba. It's currently deployed in Afghanistan doing dirty and dangerous jobs that would previously needed human beings to put themselves in harm's way. Electricpig got up close and personal with a Packbot at the iRobot Engineering Awesome event in New York and found out how and off-the-shelf Xbox 360 controller is part of a modern soldier's tool kit…

Rob Smith, a marketing director in iRobot’s military robots division, gave us a look at the iRobot Packbot and explained that the original controller, designed for the MOD was a vast metal beast which took many hours to master. In short, it was a nightmare to use. The solution? Replace it with an Xbox controller (and in some cases a PS3 controller).

Smith explains: "Soldier have grown up playing Xbox 360 so its much more intuitive for them to use an Xbox controller when operating with Packbot. The Xbox controller is also cheap and really easy to swap out." However, iRobot also offers Milspec controllers for Packbot which feature a design clearly inspired by a PS3 Dualshock controller but packed into a casing that can take serious amounts of heat, dust and knocks.

You can see the standard Xbox controller hooked up to a full iRobot Packbot control rig in the gallery above. Along with the controller, soldiers carry a BB2590 standard US Army Battery (another also powers the robot itself), a radio to communicate with the robot, a thermite computer and a pair of glasses which have heads-up-display projected on them showing what the Packrobot's camera is seeing.

The most arresting sight at the Packrobot display was the remains of Packrobot 129, killed in action during operations in Iraq. You can see it in the gallery above along with a close up of one of the parts that shows how the squad using the Packrobot came to see it as a cross between a pet and a comrade. There's a tally of operations it was involved in and a name "Scooby Doo".

We'll have more stories from the iRobot event on Monday including news on the future of Roomba and more mind-blowing future tech. Let us know what you'd like to know about the robots.

Out now | Around $31,000 | iRobot

Lexmark puts Facebook and Twitter in your printer, purpose unknown

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 07:58 AM PDT

Ah Lexmark. Where do we begin with this one? It’s not that having apps inside a printer is necessarily a bad idea – we’re quite taken with your web connected printers’ Evernote syncing skills – but we’d really loved to have been in the boardroom when this one was greenlit. Facebook and Twitter on your printer? Why?

We’d love to say this was a watercooler jest, but it’s real. If you’ve got a Lexmark printer capable of running the company’s SmartSolution in printer apps, you can now view Facebook and Twitter streams from your printer’s screen.

Bafflingly, Lexmark has even gone to the trouble of integrating Twitter search, so you can tap out a term and see what people are talking about, while you wait for all of four seconds for that report to print. The logic is that doing this leaves your “computer screen open for more important tasks” according to the company. While that’s a noble goal, we’d venture to suggest that smartphones solve this problem better than communal printers plugged into the mains.

Since it’s Friday though, we strongly urge you to hop on through to Lexmark’s Facebook page and check out the demo on video. We can’t guarantee you’ll be any more enlightened, but you will be entertained.

Out Now | £free | Lexmark

Nintendo DS patent will make shopping more exciting

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 07:51 AM PDT

A Nintendo DS patent that’s cropped up today describes an “in-store wireless shopping network using hand-held devices”. Translated out of legal talk, that seems to indicate a nifty add on for the Nintendo DS which will map out your route around a supermarket using your list, and tell you where and how many of each item you want can be found, via some sort of (hopefully) fun Nintendo DS interface.

Would you offer to do the supermarket run more often if Nintendo got this from patent into your DS? Drop us a line and let us know!

[via Engadget] [Source: USPTO]

Get Angry Birds Android free!

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 07:28 AM PDT

Wow! Angry Birds Android is now available for free. It's not in the Android Marketplace though. Rovio has put an ad-supported but full version of Angry Birds up on GetJar for £0. The free version of Angry Birds Android is apparently thanks to Rovio's desire to get as many eyeballs looking at their game as possible. That chimes well with those Angry Bird movie plans. If you've got an Android phone running Android 1.6 of later, you can grab it right now. There's one up on those iPhone owners who had to stump up cash for the game!

Out now | £free | Angry Birds

Nokia E7 vs HTC Desire Z: clash of the QWERTYs!

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 07:04 AM PDT

After we put the Nokia E7 head to head with the HTC Desire HD last week, we also got requests to put the E7 up against the HTC Desire Z, the HTC Desire HD's QWERTY keyboard sister device. So here we have it, the clash of the QWERTYs! Read on to see who came out tops, the HTC Desire Z or Nokia's big screen bad boy with flip out keyboard, the Nokia E7.

Screen
The Nokia E7 has the biggest screen of any Nokia phone around right now, with a 4" 360 x 640 resolution. The HTC Desire Z is smaller, at 3.7", but has better resoltuion, with more pixels on a smaller space, at 480 x 800 resolution. The HTC Desire Z wins here, because despite the slightly bigger screen of the Nokia E7, the HTC Desire Z has better quality, if only by a touch.

Battery Life
The Nokia E7 is listed as pushing nine hours of talktime on GSM, whereas the HTC Desire Z claims 50 minutes more, at just a smidge under ten hours. We haven't put these two through proper testing yet, and we're very aware at Electricpig towers that stated battery life is often a best case scenario, and the battery life can be a very different story when its in your hands. The two would appear to have very similar battery life. The Nokia E7 has a 1200mAh battery, and the Desire Z has a 1300mAh. The difference on paper is negligible. This one depends on whether HTC has bucked its ideas up, and whether the HTC Desire Z will help HTC start shaking off a reputation for poor battery life.

Operating system
The HTC Desire Z is running Android Froyo with HTC Sense, which we named as the best Android skin in our Android UI top five. HTC was the first company to back Android, and its OS is well integrated. We like the Leap feature for jumping between home screens, and the tight integration of social networks with your address book. Withe the HTC Desire Z, and Desire HD, it also syncs your device and all the stuff on it to HTCSense.com, which then means you can restore and back up, and it also means you can find, track, and control your device remotely. The Nokia E7 is running Symbian ^3, the new features for which includes better home screen personalisation, real multitasking and improved gesture controls too. It's not quite up to beating the HTC Desire Z though, with the extras and add ons that come with HTCSense.com.

Camera and video
The Nokia E7 has an 8MP camera, which is fully equipped with a dual LED flash, face detection, red eye reduction, a timer, and a basic image editor. Video recording is 720p at 25fps. The HTC Desire Z also has 720p video recording, and a camera with face detection, auto focus and a flash, but it's slightly lower in megapixels, sitting at 5MP. It does have better in phone editing, with settings like depth of field and vignetting that can be added to your snaps. There's no clear winner here though, and it all depends on the optics. The Nokia E7 lacks the Carl Zeiss optics that the Nokia N8 boasts, so it could be a close thing, and the proof is in the pudding.

Under the hood
The Nokia E7 has a 680MHz processor powering it, whereas the HTC Desire Z has an 800MHz processor. Neither of these is particularly impressive, but neither is it tragic. The HTC Desire Z might just give you an extra push. This is all relative though, and how the phones work with processors like this depends on lots more than just the MHz.

Conclusion
These two devices are remarkably closely matched. The camera capabilities are very similar, as are the stated battery times, and video capabilities. The HTC Desire Z wins for the slightly better screen, and the operating system: HTC Sense over Android Froyo is a dream, and the free additional sync services will be very well received by the forgetful among us.

Samsung Galaxy S Froyo update: T-Mobile delay!

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 07:00 AM PDT

Not 30 minutes ago we warned you that the Samsung Galaxy S Froyo update wouldn't be without delays and lo, here's the first one! T-Mobile has declared on its forums that Samsung Galaxy S fans on the network will have to wait until November to grab their Samsung Galaxy S Froyo updates. Bummer! Read on for the full details on the delay…

The Android 2.2 delay is down to T-Mobile and Orange mashing together beneath the umbrella Everything Everywhere. T-Mobile is delaying its release of the Samsung Galaxy S Froyo update until November to "get it working better when using Orange signal." Presumably we could see a similar for Orange Samsung Galaxy S users (folk on the network rather than Oompa Loompa Android fans).

When the T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S Froyo update is released it'll be arriving via Samsung’s Kies software. While you wait for it, check out our Samsung Galaxy S Froyo secrets dossier.

T-Mobile has issued the usual apology for the delay but is that good enough? Are you happy to wait or fed up with delays in getting the latest version of Android on your phone?

Thanks to Jon McNestrie for the heads up. We love Electricpig reader tips!

Out November | £free | T-Mobile