In the UK, Which? is an organisation who provide consumer advice to consumers. I’m sure it’s still the first port of call for many British customers but I wonder how many are willing to pay the membership fee of about £7.75 a month when they have the Internet to their disposal.

There are plenty of community-driven review sites such as Ciao, DooYoo and (in the US) Epinions. These sites can give a general feel of a product, service or company but are likely to be biased because people are more likely to blog about negative experiences and blog in the first few months of ownership of that product. I also doubt the conditions products are tested in are as ’scientific’ as Which?’s.

Still, if I ever google a product name I will get dozens and dozens of high-quality results off websites who specialise in that area. Then again, on these specialist blogs and news sites, it can be difficult to identify bias.

Another issue I expect consumers will have with using the Internet for consumer advice is finding a starting point for buying a product. Because technology develops so fast, if I were to search ‘good digital camera’, I could end up with results which are a couple of years out of date! The second result on Google dates back to 2002 (’Digital camera manufacturers often give you a choice of image size, typically between… VGA and… 3.7mp’). Sites like Ciao do try to keep up to date by maintaining ‘hitlists’ of the best products in certain categories (I do not know if this accounts for time or not).

The Internet is a much better, and cheaper, resource than organisations like Which? if you know what you’re looking for but if you are absolutely clueless it’s probably a bit overwhelming. I do believe that the paid content model of Which? (you have to pay to read) will not work in the long-term online and perhaps they should begin to rely on advertisements (but that would damage their neutral point of view) or else they will reduce in size.

Disclaimer: I am a member of Ciao, DooYoo and Epinions, receiving payments off all 3 for reviews. I am also current an advertiser for Ciao. This review is written completely independently to all of these roles.

The LG Venus KF600, provided to me by LG Blog, is a fairly new slider phone which is partially touchscreen. Unlike the LG Viewty, there are two screen (one of which, the InteractPad is touchscreen) and numbers and letters are inputted through a standard keypad.

The phone’s key feature, the InteractPad, replaces traditional navigation keys and updates depending what you want to do. When the phone is shut, no buttons are visible because it is a screen which will power off!

For example, if you wish to make a call, you will have buttons such as mute, in addition to the hard connect and disconnect on the keypad, but if you wish to use it as a camera, the screen will change to having camera buttons (zoom in etc). For bog-standard Java applications (the phone supports Java MIDP 2.0), like Google Mail, you will be given a fairly boring set of up, down, confirm and cancel buttons. I wonder if LG provide an SDK for Java developers to create interactive applications considering the default games interactively utilise the InteractPad. Quite impressively, this screen has a resolution of 176×240px in addition to the phone’s main 240×320px screen.

The phone is 2.5G, using EDGE which compared to 3G technologies is slow with a maximum of about 240kbps. Whilst I understand this is probably for cost cutting (or battery conserving) purposes I do think it’s a disappointment which may put certain users off. To be honest though, I have yet to meet anyone besides myself who requires 3G but it would be nice to support features such as video calling etc, which EDGE cannot.

I am not a massive fan of the phone’s browser but it seems somewhat fit for purpose (it does not like sites like Gmail due to their SSL (it doesn’t recognise the certificate authority) and provides no option to ‘cancel’ on sites with ‘questionable’ certificates). Personally, I would suggest the free Opera Mini.

The phone is light but the exterior, especially the battery cover, feels like it’s cheap plastic. One design feature I do like, though, is the fact the battery does not have to be removed to change the SIM card.

For the average consumer, features such as the phone’s camera and MP3 will be more important. The phone has a fairly good camera, with a resolution of 3 megapixels and a ‘flash’ (not a flash which actually flashes but one which simply acts as a light!) in addition to an image stabiliser. It is also capable of video recording.

The phone’s MP3 player can handle MP3s, WMAs, AACs and AAC+s. It also possesses an FM radio which requires you use their earphones which come with it (you’ve guessed it, the phone doesn’t have a nice, standard 35mm jack!).

The phone’s built in memory of 25MB is expandable using a MicroSD (TransFlash) card.You can easily buy a 1GB MicroSD memory card on Amazon for £5. You can also use this as mass storage by plugging it into a PC.

Call quality is absolutely fine and so is battery life, the phone having survived 48 hours with a GPRS connection (which was actually used for around 2 hours).

The phone supports Bluetooth, but not IrDA or WLAN, MMS and of course SMS. The phone also comes with some really nice themes, design by Keith Haring, which affect both the main screen and touchscreen.

What comes in the box?

• A pouch for the phone
• Manuals
• A CD
• A USB lead
• A mains adaptar
• Earphones
• A battery

Advantages of phone

• Half-way between touchscreen and a traditional phone
• Good camera
• Fairly good battery life
• Compact
• Fashionable
• Good interface and menu systems (despite what people may say about G!)

Disadvantages

• No 3G
• No IrDA
• No ‘proper’ flash
• Proprietary earphones
• Not cheap

An unlocked, SIM free KF600 will cost you £220. It is available on O2 and Orange 18 month contracts, being free of charge on O2 if you are on a £30/month contract.

Tags: lg venus, lg kf600, kf600, phones, mobile phone, lg, cell phones

At LG Blog

Technology develops so fast. I doubt that in 200 years time, we could relate to their technology. Whilst it would probably be easy enough to explain and describe a CD to someone in 1950 (a type of record which uses light to convert the stored music into sound?), how about describing that to a 1750s farmer?

So, some challenges for commenters:

1. A computer
2. An iPod
3. A camera
4. A TV
5. A Nintendo Wii
6. A Nintendo DS
7. Twitter
8. SMS

Some, obviously, are easier than others. I would guess the game consoles are probably the hardest.

Do excuse how random this post is; I will have a review of a phone online tomorrow!

3G is becoming quite common in the UK and mobile phone networks are starting to take advantage of it by offering fairly cheap 3G modems for laptops. 3 provide a good value mobile broadband service, starting at £10 with total bandwidth capped at 1GB. This price plan comes with the choice of three modems, which are free on an 18 month contract, so 3mobilebuzz sent me a Huawei E169G to review but I imagine most dongles (what 3 like to cal the modems) are the same.

Setting up the dongle could not be any more simple. All I had to do was open the box, grab the dongle (which is about the size of a stick-shaped MP3 player), place the SIM card into it and put it into my laptop’s USB port. Christian Lindholm had more difficulty having to carve the dongle to fit in his MacBook Air but then someone pointed out that it comes with a USB extension lead so it will fit in any port!

As soon as I plugged it in, OS X opened an application (which is stored on a small piece of memory on the dongle) and getting online was as simple as clicking ‘connect’ and it immediately installed drivers and the relevant network interfaces.

In fact, the only issues I have had is getting a signal but when a 3 signal is not available, it seems to be possible to roam onto other networks. However, most places have a 3 signal but sadly my house, the lodge in the middle of a forest I was staying in over the weekend or my local pub do not have a reliable one. With a little strategic searching (moving out of forests, for example) and a little luck, you can expect an extremely strong signal and I was easily getting 1Mbps. 3 say that 85% of Britons live in HSDPA (fast 3G) areas, but it definitely isn’t 85% of Britain area wise! Looking at the map of 3’s website, everywhere in my town and most of the neighbouring towns are covered by Turbo just my estate is in a blackspot which can only achieve 2G!

You also receive free international roaming in Ireland, Denmark, Austria, Hong Kong, Australia, Italy and Sweden.

Mobile broadband definitely increases your productivity. The fact you can work in a pub without paying extortionate amounts for WiFi, or on a train or in the Sports Bar at Center Parcs means that time where you would normally be without an internet connection (or an extremely slow phone connection) is now time were you have broadband! Naturally, you can use your internet for YouTube (I wouldn’t advise that though just because of the caps!), checking your emails, looking something up on Wikipedia or chatting over MSN, Yahoo! or Skype if you felt so inclined!

If it’s plug and play on a Mac, I would also expect it to plug and play on PCs because that is what most people use!

Price plans are cheap, starting at £10 a month as mentioned above for 1GB, £15 for 3GB or £25 for 7GB. If you are already a 3 customer, you can receive 50% of these prices. 3 has some other price plans which are well suited for bloggers such as the £25 Texter plan which comes with unlimited texts (fantastic for updating Twitter!) and 500 minutes as well as free Skype calls and free instant messaging! Naturally, if you sign up to a Texter plan you get a half-price mobile broadband plan (£5 a month is a worthwhile extra!).

Tags: 3, 3g, mobile broadband, huawei e169g, 3 mobile broadband

I always thought Web 2.0 had evidently gone unnoticed by my ISP, O2 Broadband, but then I came across an ISP who are still struggling to master Web 1.0: GISP. GISP is the Zimbabwean state internet provider and I came across a manual on their website which simply has be amazed.

Heck, I’m scared. Apparently ‘hackers can destroy all computers of the world connected to Internet.’ and using a search engine is apparently ‘browsing information by use of random search’ and a general use of the internet is apparently ’satanic’.

Also, I’ve been making a key error when switching my machine off over the past decade. Instead of turning the speakers off first like I am told to by GISP, I have turned the monitor (or screen in GISP lingo) off first!

Back-ups of the Internet are remarkably easy to do too. Instead of relying on the Wayback Machine or Google cache, all you need to do ‘to get a hard copy of information on the internet’ is:

# Search and get the desired information.

# Click the printer icon, then, press okay on whatever instructive dialogue which comes out.

# Your information is printed out, that is if you have a printer connected to your PC.

Internet in Zimbabwe isn’t cheap either. At the official exchange rate of ZW$30,000 to US$1, I’d be paying almost GB£150 a month for a dial-up connection or GB£5400 for a 64kbps leased line. Fortunately, the unofficial exchange rates are a bit more generous charging me about 6p a month for dial-up or about £2 for a leased line.

Sadly, because my PC isn’t dedicated just for Internet access and it isn’t a Pentium so it does not meet the minimum requirements for a dial-up connection in Zimbabwe. Oh well.

If you have ‘any queries suggestions’ just contact them at G.I.S.P. Service Provider. [service provider service provider?!] sic P.O. Box 7700. [sic] Causeway. [sic] Harare. [sic] Zimbabwe. [sic] Alternatively, give them a call at +263-4-722604.

Disclaimer: All of this is 100% genuine information from their manual etc!

Tags: Zimbabwe, gisp, internet