PhoneLon

BatteryInfo Lite is an application that allows you to view stats about your device’s battery including; temperature, current capacity, max capacity, design capacity, charge percentage, cycle count, voltage, boot voltage, serial number and model. It’s a simple little app, nothing too fancy, just a list of the battery stats. But, if that is all you

It seems the Dev-Team is getting closer to having an untethered jailbreak. When the Dev-Team found the untethered jailbreak they dubbed it the “backup plan.” (It’s a “backup plan” because comex is working on a more extensible one, but this method is also generalizable.) Yesterday Musclenerd tweeted, “… the backup plan for those w/legit access

InvertColors SBSettings is an SBSettings toggle that allows you to quickly toggle the White on Black option from the stock Settings. The White on Black option basically inverts the colors on the device. If you’ve never seen it… it’s kind of trippy… you should check it out. One thing to note is that when you

The Kinect is here and the sales results are out! Microsoft have hinted that 5 million units will have been sold by the end of 2010. If correct this would be the fastest selling peripheral of all time.

And recently, we managed to get our hands on one to see what all the fuss is about!

The Kinect is a great looking piece of kit, compared to the Wii sensor bar and playstation move, you really feel as though you’ve got a significant tool to take your gaming to the next level!

Hooking up the Kinect is very easy. Here at mobiles we have the newest variant of the xbox which has a dedicated port for the peripheral and simply plugs into the back of the xbox. Legacy xbox 360’s require the bundled power adapter which plugs into the xbox via USB and then requires the user to plug it into a power socket.

Once it’s plugged in and switched on, you have to jump through a bunch of configuration hoops which takes around 5 minutes to set up. Once you’re done you’re ready to start playing a game. One note worth mentioning at this point is that the Kinect needs 1.8m between you and it. This is a substantial gap and may rule the device out for those with smaller living rooms or bedrooms.

We tested out two games, firstly the bundled game Kinect adventures. Kinect adventures is essentially a variant of wii sports. It introduces you to how the Kinect works and lets you play as your avatar against each other in what are pretty basic games.

River rush requires you to steer a dingy through some intense rapids by taking steps left and right, you can also jump - lifting the raft with you by physically jumping around your room. Quite impressively the reaction times between you and the Kinect are minimal and you don’t feel any real time delay between what you’re doing and what your character is doing on the screen in front of you.

So far so good, however moving onto Rallyball we start to see the Kinect display it’s limitations. This game requires you to use your arms and legs to beat a ball around a room very similar to a squash court. You have targets to hit with the ball which unlock bonus points and additional balls.  Although the Kinect attempts  to track your movements and is able to tell where your arms and legs are, it isn’t able to judge subtle movements in your hands which would alter the path of the ball.

As a result your movements need to be overemphasized in order for you to change the balls direction and hit the on screen targets. The other downside to this game is that you are expected to be very accurate when hitting the ball, which when it’s virtual is very difficult to achieve. Wii sports is more forgiving in this area with Kinect not feeling as intuitive as it’s main rival. In this instance we feel Wii sports achieves more with less although this may be a programming issue and may be a fault of the game not the Kinect itself.

The next game we tried out is Dance central. This is where the Kinect seems to come into it’s own. Dance central is produced by harmonix, who brought us rockband, and they clearly know how to draw players into their games. This game offers the chance to dance around your room to some of the latest pop songs in the charts.

When you’ve put aside you inhibitions and decided to try the game, you’re instantly offered the opportunity to dance off against one of the virtual instructors. She’ll teach you some basic moves which you then have to sting together using prompts that appear in the form of flashcards. It sounds quite complicated but it’s actually very easy. The Kinect tracks your movements and highlights which part of your body is out of position, a polite pointer here and there and you find yourself dancing along to the music almost as good as the professionals.

The ability to track your entire body works extremely well and is where the Kinect comes into it’s element. The game gets you moving and you heart racing, unlike the Wii as many of us have realised can actually be played from a horizontal position on the couch. The Kinect knows when you’re cheating and punishes the player accordingly by subtracting points.

When using the Kinect it does feel like a new experience - it really does have the wow moment when you realise how clever this new bit of kit is. Clearly it’s a great addition to any gamers catalogue, but is it value for money? The Kinect is quite hefty at ?120 which is almost the price of a Wii.

If you’ve played the Wii and are happy with what it has to offer then we wouldn’t recommend jumping ship yet. For the more hardcore gamer who likes to blow things up from time to time, the Kinect seems like a good choice if you’re looking to add some movement to your gaming habits.

When compared to the price of the Playsation move it may still appear expensive, but if you consider the hardware required for four player games plus the cost of batteries to run the move controllers, you’ll actually end up spending around ?150, making the Kinect better value.

All in all we’re excited by what the Kinect brings to xbox and enjoyed playing it. What we’ve seen is that the Kinect has potential that currently no other console can offer. It’s not perfect  but we imagine that given some time, the Kinect may out manoeuvre it’s wand toting rivals.

In case you haven’t seen, we currently range the Kinect as a free gift with or without an xbox 360, so take a look here at what we have to offer and keep checking our blog for updates on new tech and phones.

Here are a few simple little mods for Christmas time. They change your slide from the unlock arrow to a candy cane, stocking, bulb, or star and changes the words “Slide to Unlock” to “Merry Christmas”. The star & blub ones also have backgrounds. You can use a program like iFile or SSH in and

Just a quick update: Gowalla has released update 3.0.1 which has fixed the crashing problem on devices running WinterBoard, a jailbreak app that lets you customize the look of your iPhone. Of course it doesn’t say that in the despcription but I tested it and it’s working now. I’m on an iPhone 4, jailbroken running

Apple today announced that it expects sales of its new Apple TV to top one million units later this week. The new Apple TV offers the simplest way to watch your favorite HD movies and TV shows and stream content from Netflix, YouTube, Flickr, and MobileMe — all on your HD TV, for the breakthrough price of just $99. iTunes users are now renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day.

iLife ‘11 is Barron’s Gadget of the Week, and reviewer Tiernan Ray gives it all 5 stars, saying iLife “makes it a breeze to polish and present photos, movies and music.” Ray particularly likes the “handsome coffee-table book” he created from his vacation photos using iPhoto, and he also highlights iMovie trailers and GarageBand Groove Matching.

It is with great excitement that today we get to announce Google’s newest handset the Nexus S, will be available right here on mobiles.co.uk.

We’re going to be offering the handset free from ?30.00 per month which when compared to some other high end handsets is unbelievable value.

The Nexus S has already been  hailed as the best Android phone ever ! The handset arrives with the latest version of Android Gingerbread and is the slickest operating system yet

In case you don’t know much about the nexus S here’s some details from one of our earlier blog posts detailing some of the hardware found in the Nexus S!

• 1 GHz Hummingbird application processor paired with 16GB of memory making the Nexus S one of the fastest phones on the market.
• It will also have a dedicated Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This makes playing video games, viewing images and watching videos much more fluid.

Apple announced that the Mac App Store will open for business on Thursday, January 6. By bringing the revolutionary App Store experience to Mac OS X, the Mac App Store makes discovering, installing, and updating Mac apps easier than ever. The Mac App Store will be available in 90 countries at launch and will feature paid and free apps in categories like Education, Games, Graphics and Design, Lifestyle, Productivity, and Utilities.