Some of the latest gadgets reviewed
BMW Portable Navigation System
Price: €470 (plus fitting) Buy: BMW dealers nationwide
The reason many Irish buyers don’t go for manufacturer’s sat nav systems is that there is VRT charged on them and they end up costing thousands, which is a bit daft when you can buy a Garmin or Tom Tom for a few hundred euro.
However, portable systems leave trailing wires and make you look a bit like a courier, so there is a new solution from BMW – they will wire a navigation system into your car and the display can be placed neatly on the dashboard. The Portable Navigation System Plus has a 4.3” touch screen display, Bluetooth, EU maps and alloys switching between 3D or 2D maps. For €660 (plus fitting) you can choose the Navigation Pro unit which adds speech recognition technology and separate steering wheel-mounted remote control.
Samsung NC20
Price: €455.63 (plus €10.94 shipping) Buy: www.elara.ie
This is the successor to the Samsung NC10, the NC20, and it’s a fine notebook for those who want their laptop small but with a half-decent brain in it, too.
It comes with a 12.1-inch glossy display and with a larger keyboard and track pad than the NC10. It also employs a Via Nano U2250 CPU running at 1.3GHz, instead of the more usual 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU. It also ships with a six-cell battery as standard, rather than the more common three-cell.
Samsung Pixon now with irishtimes.com
Price: from €49 on bill pay Buy: O2, Vodafone, Meteor, Carphone Warehouse, 3G Stores
We have already told you that the Samsung Pixon is one of the hottest new handsets around – it thinks it’s a high-end camera, with a whopping 8-megapixels, auto-focus and x16 digital zoom.
Well the good news is that Samsung Ireland has announced an exclusive partnership with The Irish Times which will allow Samsung mobile users to receive updates on their phone and access content from Irishtimes.com and MyHome.ie.
The sites feature as branded widgets on the home screen of the Pixon – mini-applications which appear as icons and enable users to have instant access to their favourite function through the intuitive “drag and drop” feature.
Over 1.5 million people visit irishtimes.com and myhome.ie each month, with a combined monthly traffic of over 35 million page impressions.
Nokia N86
Price: €664 (plus €13.50 shipping) Buy: expansys.ie
You might think Nokia has gone off the boil a bit lately, what with all the talk around iPhones and BlackBerrys, but it has been producing some serious handsets.
This one, the N86, has no less than an 8-megapixel camera and the ability to add applications, like an iPhone.
But, unlike an iPhone, it has a good battery life (315 hours on standby) and will record video, send MMS with video and comes with some neat location-based services using GPS. A fine effort from the old reliables. Oh – and a charger is never too far away.
Sony DAV-DZ260
Price: €189 Buy: Peats Electronic Stores (peats.com)
Peats are offering a very good home theatre kit for small money with the ADV-DZ260, which they say works really well with the Playstation3. It will offer superb sound from either your laptop, TV, USB devices and boasts 850W of sound from a central speaker and 4 satellite units and a 140W subwoofer. It also features a radio tuner too.