Robbing fu**ers!

What an utter rip off, although as noted the other service is down right disgusting! Both are just preying on the "what if" factor.

I'm fortunate enough to not need these services for any of my relatives or indeed myself at the moment, but when the time does come I sure won't be spending that kind of money! Especially since all it fundamentally is is a £10 Nokia with all the expensive bits taken out with a shock sensor included on the hardware front .

The monthly costs is also a bit steep if you don't have the voice option since all you need is 10p of credit on a pay as you go sim to send an emergency text to a pre-designated number!

Move along, nothing to see here

Maybe I've missed something, but it's not like the laws changed much on tax in the last 20 years and no one was bothered before... I say it's all just diversionary tactics to hide the fact the Government's fiscally done for. So their only solution is to direct everyone's attention towards "greedy" companies to avoid the public asking difficult questions about how we got into this financial mess in the first place - read borrowing FAR too much in a boom period... thanks for that Gordon, you so called economist!

Where are the rest?

Did you just get bored and stop reviewing them? There are about 20 media streamers around at the moment, several are far better than most of the ones you've noted. If it's just DVRs then the article title needs changing. I for one have a WD HDTV streamer and it's top notch and has the advantage of being flashable to give you a huge range of features.

Tools

Idiots! Which sane person would even think to ask this question...

How much?

Did I miss something here? Why would you pay £400 for something that is basically a media streamer - which can be bought from as little as £45 (or £20 if you don't need a network) and includes HDMI which will plug right into the AMP. Hell, just buy an Apple TV for £99 and that comes with some superb control apps via the iPhone and iPad. And I'm sure you can get Amps to take care of the 24-bit sampling...

Just because it's from a Hi-Fi company doesn't mean it's actually any good or good value.

Why?

Might aswell just scrap it and make a new one. Way outdated by end of summer and from the pic it looks huge and heavy!

£85m??

Why is anyone bothered, they still made £85m, which just goes to show how many stupid people there are out there!!

Pirate Copy?

Only serves to make people look to get pirated copies of games if this is the sort of hassle they have to endure to play an expensive game. Granted it's not as easy to play pirated games on consoles, but it's still quite possible and with high bandwidth internet connections you can get a full game while you are at work and quite often before it's even in the shops!

Also, EA are by far the worst games company in existence at the moment by some margin

random junk

All mince, the cars are a rip off and don't get you high enough MPG figure to justify the massive costs. Never mind how destructive the battery production process is (but we don't like to talk about that). Also, better looking Prius?? That car is like a dogs arse after it's eaten a vindalo! The Auris is far nicer looking.

Printing Costs

Having been involved in the setup of a Publishing Company I agree that Printing Costs are actually quite minimal. The reason it costs so much for books is the stitch up the shops/online shops have made of the market.

A 300 page Novel printed in B&W and say 10,000 copies costs around £1.50 once shipping is included, now if you went for a million it can drop to as little as 60p per copy. The issue is that Amazon etc.. want on average a whopping 55% of the Retail Price for themselves.

So if your book is £8 it's £4.40 to Amazon then possibly £1.50 for printing and then if you are using a publisher they only give you 10% of the Retail Price so with all of that in place the Author gets really hammered.

Using E-books should sort this out if people just self publish and cut out the huge fees to publishers and get it edited by an independent firm and use something like Lightning Source who can put work onto E-Book via Amazon at a mere 20% gouge of the Retail meaning the Author gets a lot more per book and can cut the price right down. But without a Publisher marketing a novel is very expensive, so the price goes back up.

Rip Off!

£300?? A Kindle is £109 with Wi-Fi, so you can't touch the screen, boo hoo, it's for reading, not scribbling on! And as several people have said, get a Sony if you want touch and lower price. I think Samsung are having an Apple moment - huge prices for mediocre products, their Galaxy Tab would be another example of an Apple moment.

Kill it

The only way Intel can look good in my view here is if they now shut down McAfee and fire everyone involved, it's a terrible company with a terrible product offering.

hularious!

I'd have paid money for that game, wouldn't have lasted long though! You run and lots of police surround you for 6 hours, get bored and shoot you a few times...

HAHA

I think I speak for a fair few people here - DON'T BUY FIRST RELEASES!! YOU IDIOTS!

Also, I do admire Apple, well Big Steve anyway, for the way in which he has managed to con...vince so many people into buying a phone with tech several years old (ok, the screen is quite new and swish) and charging WAY over the odds for it.

Data rates

Well as it stands T-Mobile offer the best data plans by far, so O2's plan to cripple them when T-Mobile is about to launch could be a big mistake. They've just opened them selves up to loose a lot of business and T-Mobile now has an excellent level of reception in a lot of places.

Screw O2

I'll stick to T-Mobile thanks very much, O2 have always been terrible with Data unless you paid huge sums of money to them. I'm still clinging to my old Flex tariff on a 12month contract (they'll have to kill me to get me off 12 months), which is by far the best mobile package I've ever used - pay X p/m and get Y to spend, no stupid extra charges for voice mail or MMS even though you have a billion "free" texts, just a wedge of cash to spend as I see fit! Simple. Oh and iPhone 4 = A 5 year old Nokia.

+ 100m more like it!

I'm sure I won't be the first, or the last, to say this will fail terribly and cost 3 times as much as the tender and be totally exposed to the outside world. Why does it have to accessible worldwide, it's the UK agency... or did I miss something....? Why do we want foreign people to have "secure" access to these systems, I can't think of a sensible reason.

Sound

Why does every review ALWAYS comment on the built in speakers?? No one in their right mind would actually use them. If you're blowing the better part of £2k on a TV you're going to have/be getting a proper sound system too... or so one would hope! But interesting article and tech none the less, but I'll stick to my projector and substantially bigger screen for far less than a weeny 42" TV and that's WITH the sound system.

Can't wait

BB OS 5 works just fine, one of the best and easiest I've ever used and I've used most brands out there. I just like the fact it works very well as a phone - novel concept that one!! And does everything else well too. Still, the refresh looks good and should lead to some keyboard + touch screen devices which will be a perfect combo.

Never mind

The movies never lie, been saying pull the battery for years! I wonder how long these two to vanish...

Weak

Seems a bit weak to me, small screen, low power, no memory and still £130, a brand new BB is only c. £300 and it's about 15 times better in spec terms, never mind the rest. Oh well.

Tracking

I spoke to Orange to make a claim on a broken phone and after explaining what happened was promptly interrogated for errors. This was due to their tracking software that tells them exactly what phone you are using with your Orange sim at ALL times when the phone is on, and sends back location data too! Problem with the claim was I had my T-Mob sim in the phone, so had to ask T-Mob to prove I was using the phone, called T-Mob who said "yea, we don't keep that info, or even track it". Needless to say Orange are no longer my phone provider. Sneeky fuckers! Oh and I did get the phone replaced in the end, before I left.

WTF?

Did I miss something? I know it's April 1st, but really? Maybe some more coffee will help me make sense of the words...

F**K OFF Eco mentalists

Ha, the title I wanted was in memory! Handy! If they're bothered they should stop putting out this crap. It takes energy to make it, for us to read it and for us to tell them to STFUAD. Idiots.

Classic

Superb! I know all to well how annoying people are having not read the manual or use any search engine to query their problem. But it is a good way to make a living just reading the manual back to people on the phone!

Pointless

Why do these high endish products exist? It's playing some crappy ~160kbs audio file at the end of the day with masses of compression. No amount of quality speaker can make up for a poor source!

Kennel Club = Idiots

Well clearly the spokesperson for the Kennel Club has no comprehension of how insurance prices work! The more people that insure the cheaper it gets since there is a bigger pot to pay out from, granted the odds of paying out also rise but they are not linked. Plus owners with illegal dogs won't insure their dogs anyway!

Pointless

Why does this even exist? And an external GPS dongle? Really? Even the most basic phones are coming with built in GPS these days which work just as well and triangulation via mobile antena is fairly accurate too. If you have that little trust in your child then why would you even let them go out in the first place?

Ch-Ching

So he's about to make another fortune! Good effort.

Acer = Fail

A real gaming PC should be custom built, not pre-packed with a huge mark-up. Plus my "cheap" sub £300 GFX card has HDMI out and also came with so many converters I could have gone into business. The fact ACER appear to have installed the bits and not supplied any extras for what is presumably a very expensive PC is clear proof of their crapness.

No Sh*t Sherlock

Well that's no surprise since almost every bloody handset is a touch screen now! Only a few Nokias and most BBs aren't. Long live the keypad/board!

Format

Just go to xdadevelopers get a new OS/Radio and nuke the damn thing, nice clean light install of Windows Mobile and you're sorted.

Zip it...

Last time someone did this and El Gov wanted to see what was in said protected file they locked them up until they gave up the password if I recall... In relation to the article, no surprises there, piss up and brewery comes to mind!

Security

Windows Key + L. That's all.

Bored!

Yet another one, boring.

Why bother?

I've used virus software once and it was useless. I've not had a virus scanner on my PC for heading on 6 years and amazingly I've had one virus in that time. If people just followed simple bloody rules for using the internet safely we would have no need for this rubbish. Also having a scanner that is updated after the fact seems pointless which is the case with most major outbreaks...

Multitasking?

I see an Ipod a Blackberry and an iPad, just ditch the pad and the pod and use the BB or for Mac addicts ditch the lot for an iPhone!

Prison

It's just like prison, oh wait...

Sounds interesting

If it's as easy as it sounds to apply and cheap enough could well move touch tech on a fair bit.

Neat

Rather nice toy, this is where all the greenies should be looking not bloody wind or such pointless and very expensive power alternatives!

SSL

Just bypass it by encrypting the traffic or use a different port, job done.

Mince

What a load of crap! They're chucking down a black hole as usual. Most schools now have a good IT setup but IT classes are few and far between and don't teach anything useful anyway, they are far to basic and the staff teaching know less than the kids. It's a joke.

Not everyone needs to know how to use a PC, we still need tradesmen to fix things and this is being missed out on.

Good

Good to see someone trying to get people to listen and patch their software. Although I fear it won't work as patches cost money to make.

Deal with it

Really, just deal with it. The Office experience is far better in 07/10 than previous versions. Granted it will take some time for the average office user to get the hang of the ribbon and if someone has built VBA macros then they at least have some knowledge to re-build it in the new versions of Office.

I'd expect a 3 month drop in productivity on roll out at my place with a gradual pick up over a further 3 months giving us 6 months of reduced productivity max.

Meh

Twitter still seems pointless to me and I don't see how it can make enough money to keep going realistically.

WHY?

What a total waste of money! Every child who goes to school has superb access to IT gear so why do we, the tax payer, have to pay for them to have access at home? They'll only use it to use Facebook or look at porn anyway!

F**K OFF Eco mentalists

I'm sick and tired of all this Green energy crap. It's going to cost me more so I don't want it. Just build some damn Nuclear power plants and be done with it, they're as green as they come!!