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Best MP3 player
Call of Duty: Black Ops zombies confirmed
Sky aims to cure your arachnophobia with your worst nightmare: spiders in 3D
DJ Hero 2: first play impressions!
iPlayer boss defends Flash, slaps down HTML5
Dell Streak Android 2.1 update roll out: Have you got yours?
New Apple TV name change: ITV preps the lawyers?
Best PC laptop
Lunchtime Lowdown: Mystery HTC announcement, Puma Phone reviewed and new Sony Readers incoming?
Casio: most accurate watch in the world for under £300

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 08:56 AM PDT

The best MP3 player for you isn’t necessarily an iPod. The market’s big enough for lots of companies to play in, and between them, they’ve cranked out some cracking devices to suit every audiophile, be they gym addicts or hi-fi purists. Find out which are the picks in our best MP3 player Top 5 list to the right of the full post.

Apple may dominate the market, but we consider every MP3 player that passes through Electricpig towers, iPod or not. To the right of the page, you’ll see our Top 5 best MP3 player shortlist, with a bang up to date chart of the top players to stick in your pocket, as our experts are constantly chopping and changing to keep up with rapid product cycles. But only the best make it on here.

Start checking out the best MP3 player for you by perusing through the Top 5 list to the right. You can read more about each one or jump straight to the product page on Amazon with one click, but if you don’t like what you see, tell us right here in the comments below. Are we overlooking any excellent tune chuckers?

Call of Duty: Black Ops zombies confirmed

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 08:01 AM PDT

The Call of Duty: Black Ops special editions broke cover earlier today but one detail wasn't included in the details: zombies! The return of the undead in Call of Duty: Black Ops has been rumoured for months but now the first confirmation that they're shambling back into view has appeared…

While British retailers' listings for the Call of Duty: Black Ops Hardened Edition promise "four playable co-op maps", Best Buy in the US has gone a little further. It promises (in ungrammatical fashion) a "Four Zombies Map Pack made famous from COD: World at War".

So Call of Duty: Black Ops is definitely getting zombies but it looks like the reanimated corpses will also feature in reanimated maps dragged back up from Call of Duty: World at War.

Though the British sites haven't confirmed that we'll be getting another fix of zombies in Call of Duty: Black Ops, we're pretty sure the four maps they all tout will be offer the same deal.

Let us know: are four maps reclaimed from Call of Duty: World at War be enough to satisfy your zombie cravings in Call of Duty Black Ops? Or are you hoping for some more undead add-ons

Out November 9 | £varies | Call of Duty (via CVG)

Sky aims to cure your arachnophobia with your worst nightmare: spiders in 3D

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 07:34 AM PDT

Terrified of spiders? Then you’re probably terrified of spiders in 3D too. In which case you should stay away from Sky on October 1, when Sky will be broadcasting its latest 3D creation, a 3D film intended to 'cure' arachnophobia.

We're not sure it'll catch on – how many people are willing to spend their Friday nights chilling out with a bottle of wine and a pizza, to face their most deep-seated and irrational fears in 3D on Sky?

If you're someone who is filled with a dark, irrational, abject terror at the thought of touching a spider, let alone being tricked by your own eyes into thinking they're crawling all over you, then stop reading now – the Sky 3D spider film claims to have created "groundbreaking footage" to create the "ultimate immersive experience". We're feeling slightly squirmish already.

Filming the spiders in 3D sounds like it was more than a little tricky. Director Neil Torbit, said: "We wanted to get a shot of loads of spiders in the bath, but we also needed props in the bath to give it the 3D depth it needed. Of course all the spiders hid under the props! We had four people trying to coax them out with sticks as well as blowing them with straws."

In case you can't wait for the next 3D Sky broadcast, the 3D spider film is currently showing at BugWorld Experience in Liverpool until September 5, and has been visited by an utterly mind-bogglingly raft of celebs, from Ralf Little to..wait for it… Denise Van Outen.

It’s not quite the same as the World Cup in 3D is it?

(via TechEye)

DJ Hero 2: first play impressions!

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 07:01 AM PDT

We’ve had an early sneaky peek at DJ Hero 2 this morning. More than a peek in fact, more like an entire morning of DJ Hero 2, and can confirm that it is still not like real DJing, but is still as addictive as ever, on top of which it’s got some great new features.

The key addition to DJ Hero 2 is the raft of freestyle moves incorporated into the game play. These new freestyle additions mean you can wiggle the turntable and twiddle buttons to your hearts content, for a couple of bars at least.

In DJ Hero 2 there’s a freestyle scratching move, a freestyle modulation dial to give a woozy wobble to your mix, and a freestyle fader move, to flick in and out of the two tracks. There's also the odd freestyle in taps, where you can punch in as many times as you want in the open space.

The last of these is an open bar on the green and blue tracks, indicating permission to switch it up, and flick between the two tracks. Theres a guide inside the open bars too, which will give you an idea of how it's supposed to sound best, should you (like me) be dissatisfied with your own shonky freestyle moves.

The DJ Hero 2 freestyle features can be really satisfying, if you get it right – we particularly enjoyed adding as much woozy wah-wah to Regulate as Warren G could take.

Also new to DJ Hero 2 is a raft of new DJ avatars and tracks. This includes Dj Qbert, David Guetta, (should you aspire to his weedy stature and enormous fame), and Deadmau5, complete with giant mouse head. Activision has also recently announced Tiesto to be in the crowd of new avatars.

New mixes for DJ Hero 2 are the expected batch of guaranteed floor fillers: Nelly's Hot in Here with Regulate by Warren G; Pussycat Dolls – Don't Cha with Pitbull's Calle Ocha; Iyaz – Replay with Rude Boy by Rihanna; Just Dance by Lady Gaga with Deadmau5's Ghosts N Stuff, and a Chemical Brothers supermix of Galvanize and Leave Home. There’s also a special battle mix for DJ Hero 2: MSTRKRFT ft N.O.R.E. – Bounce (FSG Remix).

On to game play DJ Hero 2. There’s still the two player and solo story mode, only the story mode has been upgraded and added to. Getting chucked off stage is restricted to the story mode, where you battle your way up to DJ stardom from dingy pub backrooms to the dizzy heights of Ibiza superclubs. Party mode lets you drop in and out, meaning you don't have to wait to get a drink, and if both players drop out, it'll play the mix in its full glory.

There's a range of different two player battle modes. Points battle clocks up points and counts up at the end, DJ battle splits the song in two, and whoever performs best in their various allocated sections wins, and the accumulator mode, which means you clock up points the longer the run, and you bank points as you go. Drop a beat though, and your points knock to zero, and you've got to work it back up again.

What do you think of the new freestyle moves added to DJ Hero 2? Will you be upgrading from the original DJ Hero? Tell us in the comments…

Date TBC | Price TBC

iPlayer boss defends Flash, slaps down HTML5

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 06:35 AM PDT

iPlayer boss, Erik Huggers, has taken to his blog to defend the BBC's penchant for Flash and give HTML 5 the boot. He says the Beeb uses the Adobe format on merit but commenters continue to grumble that the corporation has made exceptions for Apple with alternative iPhone and iPad iPlayer versions. If you've been hoping for an HTML5 iPlayer soon, you're out of luck…

On his blog, Hugger says: "Our use of Flash is not a case of BBC favouritism, rather it currently happens to be the most efficient way to deliver a high quality experience to the broadest possible audience." We know at least one man down Cupertino way who wouldn't agree with that.

Huggers goes on to give HTML5 a big of battering. He says: "The fact is there's still a lot of work to be done on HTML5 before we can integrate it fully into our products. As things stand I have concerns about HTML5's ability to deliver on the vision of a single open browser standard."

The BBC man claims HTML5 is too tied up in a row about standards and claims the pace of innovation around the format is slowing. His lukewarm view on HTML5 is in sharp contrast to the glowing praise delivered by web video provider Brightcove earlier this year. It reckons the format is on course to kill off Flash completely.

What Huggers doesn't address in his post is the issue of piracy and reassuring content owners. The iPhone and iPad iPlayer implementations use HTML5 to deliver H.264 and AAC streams to Apple devices which can't do anything but watch them (unless you jailbreak your device). Currently securing an HTML5 iPlayer for every device would prove tricky.

With Android 2.2 Froyo bringing full Flash support to more Android devices, the number of Google OS lovers feeling aggrieved about struggling with iPlayer on their mobile will be reduced. But not everyone is getting Flash on their phone and anger about Apple seemingly getting special dispensation is sure to continue to simmer.

Let us know: how to do you watch iPlayer? Are you annoyed by the Beeb's take on HTML5 and offering iPlayer on more devices?

Out now | £free | BBC

Dell Streak Android 2.1 update roll out: Have you got yours?

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 06:09 AM PDT

We knew the Dell Streak Android 2.1 update would be coming before that initially promised Froyo upgrade, and we’ve just had a tip to say it’s begun rolling out for some lucky owners. Are you one of them?

Reader and avid Dell Streak fan Marc has tipped us to say that the Dell Streak Android 2.1 update we heard about last week, and got a glimpse of in a sneak preview, is rolling out already. That’s earlier than the promised September window, but not outside of the realms of possibility by any means.

We’ve checked for updates on our Dell Streak and aren’t being offered one, but it’s been sourced directly from Dell, so we wouldn’t necessarily expect it to if it’s up to network O2 to push out the bump from Android 1.6. Are any of you Dell Streak owners out there seeing it?

We know it’s not the Dell Streak Froyo update we’d really, truly love, but it’s still a big bonus, especially if it fixes the keyboard, our biggest niggle with the big Google slab.

We’ve contacted O2 to confirm whether the update has indeed begun to roll out and will update when we hear back.

Have you got a Dell Streak? Have you been blessed with an Eclair update? If so, let us know, and if you’re still waiting too, let us know in the comments below.

New Apple TV name change: ITV preps the lawyers?

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 06:02 AM PDT

The new Apple TV rumours that emerged earlier this week have apparently riled up executives at ITV. The tabloids have leaped on talk of a name change from Apple TV to the iTV, reporting that the TV channel has consulted its lawyers. Prepare your pinch of salt and read on for details…

The Mirror claims to have word from within ITV that it is "furious" about the utterly-unconfirmed new Apple TV plans. It quotes an unnamed station insider who says: "You only have to look at the recent problems with the iPhone 4 to see not everything Apple produces is gold dust. We all take our ITV brand very seriously and we'll do everything in our power to protect it."

That quote seems a little too aggressive to us and conveniently wraps the iPhone 4 antenna controversy into the story. As we noted when we reported on the new iOS Apple TV rumours, the TV channel holds the ITV trademark in the UK and isn't likely to look kindly on anyone else trying to use it. But Apple has announced no such plans for Apple TV yet and it's highly unlikely that ITV would deploy its lawyers without provocation.

The Mirror throws a little more spice into its report by claiming Apple "denied the names would be too similar." Apple says it told the Mirror no such thing and is sticking to its usual line: that it doesn't comment on rumours or speculation.

What should Apple rename the Apple TV? And regardless of the name it arrives carrying: are you excited by the prospect of Apple's set top box getting a proper refresh?

Out TBC | £TBC | Apple (via The Mirror)

Best PC laptop

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 04:57 AM PDT

The best PC laptop models these days are slimmer, faster, cheaper, and more powerful than ever. And there’s an awful lot of them too. Which one should you choose? Whether you’re on the hunt for a mobile machine or a desktop replacement for the family, we’ve got a pick for you right here in our Best PC laptop Top 5 list, which you can see to the right of the full post.

Cast your eyes over to the right of the page and you’ll see our Best PC laptop Top 5 countdown, with our picks of the finest Windows machines that can be yanked from the mains. We’re constantly updating and changing this list to keep it current, and you can check out more about each candidate for the Best PC laptop title buy giving the Read More and Buy It buttons a click.

Disagree with our Best PC laptop Top 5 shortlist over to the right? Kick start a debate by throwing your hat into the ring in the comments below, and tell us what you think should be in there.

Lunchtime Lowdown: Mystery HTC announcement, Puma Phone reviewed and new Sony Readers incoming?

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 04:25 AM PDT

We’re just hours away from the weekend, but we say start the celebrations early, by kicking back with a roundup of everything that’s gone down in gadget land so far today. It’s all right here ready and waiting for you in your lunchtime lowdown.

It’s been a busy morning in mobile first up. HTC slipped out an intriguing invite this morning for an event next month. What will it be showing? Needless to say, we’ll be there. In the meantime, we set loose our full Puma Phone review, including our test of how its solar panel fares in the British Summer.

Elsewhere in gadgetry, we heard that Sony is prepping two new Reader models to take on the Kindle, and got a peek at some great value deals on our Electricpig offers page.

Finally, on the Apple side of things, we spied two new apps worth a look: an iPad version of Photoshop, and more disappointingly, an official Final Fantasy 7 iPhone app, which isn’t the game itself.

Still want more news? Hop on through to the homepage and help yourself to it all as it breaks.

Casio: most accurate watch in the world for under £300

Posted: 13 Aug 2010 04:03 AM PDT

If you're currently lining up everything on your desk at right angles, and listening to the talking clock, the Casio Edifice M-11 is a watch you should be considering. The Casio E-11, as the polite chap doing the presentation was pleased enough to tell me, "is the most accurate watch in the world, and it's less than £300. Even a Rolex isn't this accurate". Impressed? We were.

The accuracy of the Casio Edifice M-11 (full name EQW-M1100DB) comes from it being "radio controlled" – it communicates with various time-keeping masts, and calibrates the time to about six times a day, five if you're in China, by communicating with these masts automatically, although you can also calibrate manually.

The Casio M-11 is a chronograph, with a stopwatch, alarm, three dials, for 24 hour, world time hour and minutes and date, and the solar power means it will last 5 months in total darkness after a full light charge.

If you're a stickler for accuracy, this watch comes in at a snip, at £275. It looks pretty swish for a Casio too…