TechExposé

Initially, Google Street View was fairly controversial with many people complaining about invasion of privacy and such issues. However, those concerns have not stopped Google from expanding the service, because as of tomorrow (11th March 2010), you lucky (or unlucky depending on which side of the fence you’re sat) people in the UK will have access to a total 96% of all roads, streets and avenues across the isles.

The infamous camera cars have been out and about over the last year busily snapping up everything from busy city streets to little lanes in the middle of God knows where, there’s even been some Google Path View images captured using specially equipped trikes.

In some parts, such as the village of Broughton, the journey of the car has been somewhat treacherous with outraged protesters lining the streets creating human blockades preventing the car from snapping their streets. None the less, Google got their way in the end and we’ll all be able to go spotting more strange Street View sights in the UK with all these new images.

The Google Street View (UK) mapping service has been somewhat of a success since its inception around a year ago. According to recent statistics regarding the service, 1 in 5 people use it to find their next house! As well as the 60% majority which use it to actually find their way and others use it to spy on foreign countries, perhaps a holiday destination. But all in all, Google Maps has seen a 30% increase in users since the street view arrived.

The UK is not the first, and will certainly not be the last to reap the benefits of the Street View service with dozens of nations coming before with very few, if any real complaints thus far. In its defense over privacy issues, Google had this to say…

“Google has gone to great lengths to safeguard privacy while allowing all British users to benefit from this feature…Google UK has consulted extensively with many privacy and community groups in developing the feature and privacy safeguards.”

“The blurring technology is continually improving but sometimes this means we get some false positives – in some cases you can find we’ve blurred the face on a poster or the face of Colonel Sanders on the KFC signs,”

Clearly they’ve had to face several restrictions since implementing the service, but so far it has only been a roaring success. Ed Parsons, Google’s geospatial technologist, promoted its success in a short statement, “Street View takes mapping to a level not possible before. And with so many practical applications it’s no wonder that over two thirds of people who had tried the service said they would use Street View again.”

So what are your opinions on Google Street View UK? With the blurring technology in place and protecting privacy do you still have issues with it? particularly now it’s expanding so rapidly. Do you use the service regularly? I personally don’t drive so the only use I have found for it for me, is keeping a track on changes in the area in which I grew up, which was limited so the expansion has my highest approval.

Via – IT Pro

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Google Street View Now Covers Whole Of UK (Almost)

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The Playstation 3 could be receiving a firmware update as early as this June, which will include the ability for PS3’s to play 3D games. This will be to coincide with the release of Sony’s new Bravia 3D-Ready TV’s which are set for a release of June 10th in Japan with the price of the 46inch 3D TV set at around 350,000 yen which equates to around £2,500.

But no doubt the price will be higher over here as is the norm, so expect a price of around £3000 for the first 3D ready TV to hit the UK shores. Hopefully they’ll be cheaper than that, but I highly doubt it.

I can’t see this being an instant hit as Sony are pricing the average gamer out of the 3D market as soon as it’s launched, because who the hell as a spare £2500+ laying around the house?

But with the upcoming release of Batman Arkham Asylum: Game of the Year Edition with the option to play it in 3D without a 3D ready TV or the new firmware update, do we really need to splash out on the new higher priced TV’s just yet? They will eventually fall in price, but it might take a couple of years for Sony to benefit from PS3 users playing on 3D Bravia TV’s.

Let us know your views in the comments below.

Via – IGN

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3D Gaming On Playstation 3 In June 2010? (PS3)

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If you haven’t heard of Tagcrumbs before, it’s a service dedicated to sharing your favourite places with your friends and people on the web, offering a great service when finding things to do around where you are, or just finding new places.

With such a service being well suited to location aware devices such as the iPhone 3GS, it was only a matter of time until Tagcrumbs had an application on the App Store, and it’s now available in the store for seven countries.

With the free Tagcrumbs iPhone app, you can recommend a place you’ve been for others to go, knowing that they’ll have a great time. With Tagcrumbs, users can tag places they find, offering great flexibility to users who can recommend and find virtually anything they want that’s been tagged by others.

Another great feature of this free application is that if you’re not connected by Wi-Fi and don’t have GPS active, there’s an online mode that you can use to draft recommendations and then publish them when you have a connection.

With the introduction of their iPhone application, it makes for the perfect means of adding or “tagging” places onto Tagcrumbs in a similar way to other location-based apps, however this is more about providing information about the places that you’ve been to rather than broadcasting out to the world where you are at that precise moment in time.

Another interesting feature is that you can create digital breadcrumb trails for others to follow in your footsteps (quite literally), which I’m sure could be quite fun, whether you’re on holiday and looking for a tourist trail or simply looking for a new pub crawl route for a night out.

I’m sure there’s lots more to come from these types of location-based apps, but I’m pleased to see that this particular one seems to have more direction and purpose than some of the other more big name apps out there that I’ve tried on my iPhone 3GS! Let’s hope they come up with an Android version of this app soon!

If you’re a someone who loves location-based apps, then, you’ll definitely like this Tagcrumbs iPhone app and you should try it out from the App Store as soon as you can!

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Tagcrumbs iPhone App Review

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So when exactly could an iPod speaker be considered over the top? When the neighbours come knocking? When the police get called? Nope, now it seems there is a new benchmark – size.

Introducing the Wall Of Sound which dwarfs any personal speaker I have ever seen in my lifetime. Weighing in at 225 pounds and completely handmade, the Wall Of Sound can be purchased for mammoth price of $4,495.

Promoted as the world’s most powerful iPod speaker, the Wall Of Sound has a frequency response of 40Hz – 20,00kHz, which is impressive to say the least. Here is the actual description of the product as seen on the official website;

So would you buy one? Or more importantly, could you fit one in your house? I know I couldn’t, perhaps this is something for Steve Jobs himself, although he probably would have opinions about the styling not going with his iPod Nano!

This mammoth ‘gadget’ is certainly not very eco friendly either and I doubt it has the ‘Energy Star’ which has become so relevant on the latest gadgets of 2010. I think I’ll have to pass on this being the speaker for my iPod Touch, I wonder just how many of these will be sold though?

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Wall Of Sound: The Biggest iPod Speaker In The World!

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One of the great delights of Mac OS X on my MacBook Pro is how easy it is to install and uninstall applications and now AppZapper makes it even easier. For those of you who aren’t familiar with OS X, when installing an application, all you have to do (most of the time) is drag and drop in to your applications folder.

When uninstalling, you simply drag the application into the trash can. As with any program, however various leftovers remain on your hard drive which are hard to identify amongst the multitude of other files floating around. This is where AppZapper comes in!

It’s a simple application which allows you to drag any application in to a small window. AppZapper then finds all related files for you and groups them together ready to be ‘Zapped’ with the main application. The whole process is not only simple, but effectively manages to delete any related files and save space on your hard drive, in this sense it’s similar to the recently reviewed CleanMyMac software.

Oh, and did I mention the really addictive ‘zap’ sound you hear as well as the screen flashing every time an application is deleted? Don’t worry, you can choose for this not to happen, but it’s cool right?

As well as the standard drag and drop feature, a recently introduced feature, ‘Hit List’, allows you to visually browse all of the applications on your Mac. If you find one that you no longer want, simply hit Zap and the application along with all its related files will be gone!

AppZapper is shareware, free to try for 5 zaps before requiring a license which can be bought for $12.95 from the AppZapper site.

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Alternatively check out some of our other sites – Gadgets For Men – Tech-Styling – Cheap Bargains – Zath TV

AppZapper Review (Mac OS X)

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Last Sunday I was lucky enough to visit the annual Focus on Imaging exhibition where I joined the anticipated 35,000 other people that will be coming through the doors of the NEC over the next few days (until this Wednesday 10th March 2010, so it’s not too late for you to pay it a visit) to see what has become the most popular photographic show in the country.

What everyone comes to see is one of the biggest concentrations of cameras and anything vaguely related to them this side of Buckingham Palace, and to see some of the biggest names in the business showing off their best and newest offerings to the market: people such as Panasonic, Nikon, Canon, Adobe, Epson, Fuji, HP… I could go on!

So having spent a good few hours there I’ll give you a little taste of what you’ll be able to see there with a look at some of the highlights (of course in my opinion!) – of course I will only be skimming the surface as with just under 200 exhibitors there is far too much to go into any detail with, but I will try!

One of the first exhibitors I saw was Panasonic (mostly cause of the massive adverts that adorned the walls) where as well as showing off the full range of their cameras and camcorders – all of which could be picked up and played around with – they had some wonderful cases in which they had cameras that had been ‘blown apart’ so you could see all of the inner workings which was incredibly interesting.

But even more so was the world release of both the G2 and G10 both of which were on display, both of which I had a good look at and both of which will be looked at in more detail! They also had a 3D TV set up with short presentations aimed to show you the best that home 3D has to offer, and again we will look at that in greater depth.

Moving onto the rest of the exhibition and not too far away was an Apple ‘theatre’ where they are celebrating Photoshop’s 20th birthday, and are doing so by giving short talks showing the best of CS4, Photoshop Elements 8 and on ‘Colour Management’ throughout the day – which if you are using, or planning to use, any of those could well be invaluable.

Another exhibitor offering seminars was Canon who not only offered seminars on specific subjects – the most prominent being wedding photography with various special speakers (Brian Hall, Jeff Ascough and others), and also talks on specific EOS cameras – but were also showing off their vast array of lenses such as the stupidly oversized EF500mm f/4.0LIS USM (along with many similar examples) which they had set up on a little viewing station allowing you to really experience the ‘power’ across the exhibition.

If you’re thinking of purchasing a camera (or tripod, case, memory card or in fact pretty much anything) and have something in mind then ‘Focus on Imaging’ could well be for you as not only are quite a few manufacturers offering various discounts themselves there are a couple of retailers present as well (Jacobs have a particularly big stand) which have got some pretty good deals on and if you can pretty much guarantee to save anything from 5% to 50% depending on what you’re looking for, which easily makes up for the £10 entrance fee!

Moving onto a more commercial scale Epson were present with demonstrations of the more industrial sized printers along with a very informative talk explaining the benefits of it as well as a range of about 20 different well-manned printers up and running ranging from massive to desktop size.

Apple were also present, not only in the form of the Macs and MacBook Pro’s that everybody was using to show off software, but also at the ‘Apple Solution Expert Theatre’ where despite being plagued by temperamental internet access we were shown through the latest addition of Aperture which included some pretty neat geo-tagging features which promised (perhaps a little optimistically) to change the way we search for images.

One of my favourite exhibitors are slightly different in the sense that they are not selling cameras or software, but still definitely worth a look at – and it is one showing the photos from the BIPP National Photographic Awards which really goes to show what quality is possible from good photography, and is a nice reprieve from the lenses, shutters and printers that are everywhere else!

So that’s a brief taster of the Focus on Imaging exhibition, and I would strongly encourage anyone who has even a passive interest in photography to get down there – it is a really interesting day out! Also stay tuned for a more in depth look at some of Panasonic’s offerings from the show (including the newly released G2 and G10) in the coming days!

© This is blog post content from Zath! – Hi Tech Gadgets & Tech News Blog (UK), be sure to visit for more great content!

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Focus On Imaging 2010 Review (Photo & Video Image Capture Exhibition)

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Whoever invented discount vouchers should most probably be a saint…if you look hard enough, you’ll be able to find discount vouchers for most stores you’d want to buy from, but it’s the looking that’s the hard part!

Luckily for us, the VoucherCloud iPhone App takes the pain out of hunting for vouchers by simply offering you choices based on your current location and any category you wish to view.

VoucherCloud is available as a free application on the App Store, if you’re out and about you’ll be saving money in no time with all the offers in your area that you didn’t know about! Presenting offers around your current location using GPS is a great location based service that makes this app a great addition to your iPhone.

Registration on your iPhone is a simple process taking less than a minute and by default after locating you, you’re shown all offers, but you can narrow down the search by selecting any of the icons which gives you more relevant results based on what you want. If you find something that interest you, it can be selected to give you more details on the offer as well as contact information of the business, including an address and phone number.

If you want to use the voucher, simply select ‘Use’ to display the voucher that you show to the shop assistant who will then scan the onscreen barcode to give you your discount there and then.

I’m really pleased with how it works, it reminds me of similar US-only apps which launched last year and I was annoyed that there was no UK counterpart – well now there is! Having tested it out here at Zath on our iPhone 3GS, we’d say it’s certainly a very useful iPhone app to have with you when you’re out and about looking to save some cash – and who doesn’t want to do that?

Being a very well designed and useful application, VoucherCloud is definitely worth checking out from the App Store; just showing your iPhone to shop assistants (much like with the Tesco Clubcard iPhone App) is something that’ll take some getting used to though! However, if you don’t entirely trust your local stores to know what they’re doing just yet, you can still print out the vouchers from the VoucherCloud Mobile Vouchers website and take them along as backup, perhaps until you trust stores to fully know what’s happening.

Also, if you don’t have an iPhone, then you won’t have to wait long until you can get an equivalent VoucherCloud app for various other mobile phone platforms (such as Android) as these are being rolled out during Spring 2010.

© This is blog post content from Zath! – Hi Tech Gadgets & Tech News Blog (UK), be sure to visit for more great content!

Alternatively check out some of our other sites – Gadgets For Men – Tech-Styling – Cheap Bargains – Zath TV

VoucherCloud iPhone App Review

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I know, I know, Christmas happened way back in December, but presents are better late than never! In case any of you Apple fanboys out there missed the news, Steam announced yesterday morning that they’re bringing their service to the Mac along with a great library of games which will be available to purchase like PC users running Steam.

In case you’ve not used used it before, Steam is probably the best digital games distribution platform out there, which most of the big and small games publishers are now using to cut out the need for physical media distribution for games. Not only are publishers using it to release new games, but also to find a market for their older games, for example Lucasarts re-released some of their older classic titles. It’s fair to say that we’re big fans of it here at Zath.

Gabe Newell, the President of Valve, said “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services” and also introduced a great new feature which got me really excited, called Steam Play. With Steam Play, you can purchase a game for the Mac or Windows, and then download it free of charge for the other platform! This is a fantastic feature if you’re working from a PC at work and then go home to your Mac and want to continue exactly where you left off, you can!

Cross-platform compatibility is a huge advantage in what is currently a very divided market between PC games and games on Mac OS X. If you’ve bought PC games on Steam before now, this means that you’ll be able to download these games free of charge for the Mac when Steam comes to OS X.

Another piece of great news was delivered by John Cook, Director of Steam Development, who assured users “We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360″.

Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates.” Not only does this mean that OS X users won’t have to wait a ridiculously long time until releases come to the Mac, but it also means that gamers will be able to play games online with cross-platform multiplayer compatibility. Both Mac and Windows users will be part of the same universe and share servers and lobbies, ensuring the best cross-platform multiplayer gaming for Mac users.

Arguably the most important point made in the release was also from John Cook, who used the press release to say that although various methods of getting the games on to the OS X platform were considered, Steam opted to go with native versions in favour of emulation. This means that games offered through Steam on OS X will all be native versions of the game, which means better performance when gaming.

As far as I’m concerned, this news allows me to bid my final farewell to Bootcamp, and Windows on my Mac for the most part – I currently only use it for gaming and coding projects. It’s great to see Steam for OS X, which may hopefully help take an extra step in dismissing the ridiculous DRM schemes that many game companies have when selling games and until we see the likes of OnLive’s games on demand service launch and deliver on their promises, this is a great step in the right direction.

If enough users use Steam on both the Mac and PC, it may help avoid incidents such as Ubisoft’s error in their DRM usage on latest titles such as Assassin’s Creed 2, which has only put legitimate gamers at a disadvantage due to server attacks whilst all those sensible pirates carried on playing without any problem – it’s about time the gaming industry sorted itself out, let’s hope that Steam’s Mac OS X release date in April helps its cause.

Via – Engadget

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Steam Coming To Mac OS X (Digital Games Distribution)

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I mentioned last week that Disney were talking about a possible Tron trilogy, but only if the new Tron Legacy does well at the cinema.

Well following on from the back of that news, a new trailer has been released and I cannot wait to see this film. Looking at the original Tron trailer, you can see how dated it is, yet is still remains a classic. But Tron Legacy will be the way that Tron was meant to be seen, and the fact that we’ll be able to watch it in 3D is all the more exciting.

The base of the story seems to be that Flynn’s (Jeff Bridges) son goes looking for him after being told by Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) that a message had been received from Flynn’s office. Of course, his son ends up going into Tron and ends up finding his father (I presume). But that’s about as much as I know.

Check out the trailer below and let us know what you think.

Via – IGN

© This is blog post content from Zath! – Hi Tech Gadgets & Tech News Blog (UK), be sure to visit for more great content!

Alternatively check out some of our other sites – Gadgets For Men – Tech-Styling – Cheap Bargains – Zath TV

Tron Legacy Trailer #2

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Acer has added another ultra portable notebook to its range with the launch of the Acer Aspire One 752. The Acer Aspire One 752 is almost identical to the Acer Aspire Timeline 1410.

The Acer Aspire One 752 features an 11.6 inch LCD display with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, processing comes from a 1.3GHz Intel Celeron ULV743 processor and graphics is provided by an Intel GMA 4500MHD chip.

Memory wise, the Acer Aspire One 752 comes with up to 4GB of RAM, there is a 320GB hard drive and it features integrated 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth and Gigabit Lan.

The Acer Aspire One 752 comes with Dolby audio plus one HDMI port and it has a reported battery life of up to five hours. There are no details on when the Acer Aspire One 752 will hit the stores and no information as yet on how much it will cost.

via Geeky Gadgets

Post from http://www.gadgettastic.com

Acer Aspire One 752 CULV Notebook