Samsung are not well known for producing mobile phone bruisers but they have decided it is time they got into the rough ‘n tough mobile game and there contribution is, the appropriately named Samsung Solid or Samsung SGH-M110 if you want to get all technical. As the name would suggest, the Samsung Solid is not about cool features or slick looks, it is tough, it is durable and it could just bail you out of a tight situation.

The Samsung Solid is a phone which is more at home in a builders yard or up the side of a mountain than in an office or University. Housed in a thick rubber body, the Samsung Solid is hard enough to take some extreme punishment, making it perfect for bricklayers or extreme sports enthusiasts. It has anti-shock protection, as well as water and dust resistance so it will survive a couple of falls or a few splashes.

The Samsung Solid does have some features however, it has an FM radio, Bluetooth connectivity, a 0.3MP camera (cough, cough!) and a very long battery life… very long! It also has an SOS dialing feature. If you should find yourself in a spot of bother, by pressing the volume button three times, an alert message will be sent to a nominated person then after that the next inbound call will be answered automatically. The best thing about the Samsung Solid though is that it has a torch, just in case you fall down a hole, get lost in a cave or simply because you are scared of the dark, that is bound to come in handy sometime.

The Samsung Solid is definitely not the phone for playtime but is perfect for taking along to work.

If you have Apple fever or have an interest in anything tech at all I’m sure you would have been well aware of the pre-Macworld talk of a super thin new Macbook dubbed “Air” and if you weren’t, well, then i guess you are now. Now all the rumours, small talk and dreams of Apple fanatics everywhere have become reality. Yes, the Macbook Air has landed ladies and gentleman and boy is it beautiful.

The Macbook Air resembles more of a two page essay than a Laptop it is so thin, a whole 19mm thin to be exact which gives it the tag of “Worlds Skinniest Laptop”. The anorexic notebook has an all-aluminum case, a very impressive 13.3 inch LED screen and a multi-touch keypad similar to that of the iPhone so you can scroll through windows and rotate and view images. For your wireless needs it has 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 and ERD connectivity to help you get connected, so you’re not exactly short of options. When it comes to the hard-drive, consumers will have the option of a 80GB hard-drive or a 64GB solid-state drive (which will cost you a bit more) plus you get a hearty 2GB memory and a 1.6Ghz or 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo processor.

Just before i was about to carve “Fraser + Macbook Air 4ever” into a tree, i decided i better take the cons into consideration. Well, there is no VGA, no Ethernet socket, no chance of expanding the RAM memory or the hard drive, no replaceable battery and no optical disk drive. No optical disk drive was the one that really struck me and most probably you as well. You might be thinking “What if i want to throw on a CD?” or “How do i install that new software i just bought?” Well here is the thing… you don’t. Well, that is not entirely true but in order to do it you will have to borrow another Mac or PC and connect it with your Air in order to load it up, or you can go out and buy an external optical drive. Bit of a nuisance or cool new… feature? I’ll let you make up your own mind on that one.

Steve Jobs said about the Macbook Air “It was built to be a wireless machine” and that’s all very well Steve but for me there is too much sacrifice. It looks bloody fantastic and i dig the multi-touch keypad and the nice LED screen but the abandonment of lots of bog standard features doesn’t go down with me and for £1200 i want them. The Macbook Air is to be launched in the U.S of A on January 29th but we will have to wait a bit longer for a release date in the UK so the current Macbook range will have to do for now.

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts I am considering picking myself up a gaming laptop. Although I am still considering this, part of me just thinks I should spend my hard earned dollars on a proper desktop gaming rig. If I do take the desktop path, then one of the most important decisions I will have to make will be on the graphics cards I will use. The two top players in this market, Nvidia and Radeon are continually slugging it out on the graphics card battlefield, which of course normally mean the victor can only be assured of top dog for a matter of months, sometimes only weeks. This of course means, for the gamer, there is always a new ultimate graphics card waiting to make us all giddy.

Apart from a certain amount of confusion this ongoing battle does help to keep delivering top drawer hardware for even the most power hungry gamer - hey that’s me ! I remember the first time turning on Half Life and thinking that I had died and gone to gamers heaven. The graphics were so immersive I couldn’t believe that a desktop machine, in my house, could be capable of such beauty. Now of course we have the likes of Crysis making our retinas bleed and our bank manager wondering why our accounts are empty and our credit cards are to the max.

So, hypothetically speaking of course, if I were in the market for a new graphics card which ones, from NVidia and Radeon would I go for? Well for starters I think I would need to consider the GeForce 8800 range. First of this card can be run in SLI mode, which basically means if you have a compatible motherboard you can run two of these beasts to get, yes that’s right, twice the performance - wow ! Full support for DirectX 10, 16x anti-aliasing, 128 bit floating point high dynamic range lighting, OpenGL 2.0 support to name a few key features make this one of the most advanced gaming graphics cards available today. Combine this with a powerful system, sit back and prepared to be amazed by the eye-popping graphics that will be presented before you.

In the Radeon corner I’d probably consider something like the Radeon HD 3870, which once again ticks the boxes when it comes to high performance high def gaming. Support for DirectX 10.1, HDMI support and Shader Model 4.1 make this another top performer for the power hungry gamer.

Of course both cards support for features such as DirectX 10 are not yet being taken full advantage of, given that a host of games have yet to support it, and those that do have some issues with Vista. I’m sure however these initial teething issues will soon make way for eye watering high def frag-tastic gaming goodness.

Right I’m off into the shopping wonder-ness that is the Internet, armed with a cold beer and a credit card screaming use me, use me ! I could be sometime !

When LG and Prada teamed up last year to have a bash at touchscreen mobile it didn’t go down quite as well as they wished for, i mean, it looked fantastic! but the iPhone over-shadowed the LG Prada from the word go. They were maybe quicker out of the blocks than Apple and its iPhone but they were never going to win the touchscreen marathon were they? or have you forgotten all about the Prada phone already? Yes, that’s what i thought but don’t worry, your memory is about to be refreshed because LG and Prada are set to launch a new version of their very sleek looking, high fashion LG Prada phone.

This time around, the luxury LG Prada will be strutting down the catwalk in silver instead of black and will come with an added QWERTY keyboard to offer an additional option when inputting text. Does this sound like LG have conceded that they didn’t get it 100% right the first time around? Probably, but at least they have owned up and given us another option with the keyboard. As it is Prada, the phone wouldn’t be complete without some sharp looking accessories. These come in the form of a silver leather case and earphones, oh! and don’t forget the all important Prada packaging with its top of the range Prada cardboard and high quality Prada bubble wrap. So, not a lot has changed really apart from the QWERTY add-on and the lick of paint, you still get the 2MP camera and all the media capabilities but more importantly the LG Prada is still absolutely gorgeous and would make any owner proud to walk down the street with it. The LG Prada will be available across Europe from the end of January.

Is it just me or is public radio becoming less about music and more about some overpaid, under-talented nobody bleating on about what they had for breakfast this morning, or going on about who they met this morning on the way into work, who actually turned out to be another nobody. Look none of us really care, give us back our tunes.  This is a problem I’m not prepared to put up with up with any longer and so I’m in the market for a new car stereo which can hook into my mp3 player, a Zune as it happens. I also subscribe to a lot of audio podcasts, so the ability to catch up with these on the daily commute will come in handy.

I was pleasantly surprised to find an extensive offering of car audio, like this Pioneer, which will allow you to connect your mp3 player via the line in, or you can load a CD full of your favourite mp3s and play those instead. Given that that you can fit on many more MP3 songs than a regular audio CD this is a great feature if you want to keep your car free of lots of empty CD cases. It will also play regular CDs, and of course allow you, if you must, tune into your local radio station - ah yes he had an Egg McMuffin this morning ! The Pioneer also allows, via an optional connection to control your music collection on your iPod from the stereo. Or how about this offering from JVC which, although lacks support for plugging in an external MP3 player does once again support MP3 or WMA CDs. It also supports DAB radio, which allows you to get the additional  features offered from digital radio, such as textual information.

Finally with systems such as these I can say no to local radio and listen to my own music / podcast collection on the way to work - roll over Mr DJ here comes the Cliff Richard Christmas Special !

So I’ve been thinking for some time now about upgrading my home gaming PC, a desktop. I was initially thinking about picking myself another desktop system, however the more I think about it the more I’m thinking about moving across to the laptop gaming party. Over the past few weeks I’ve been speaking to a few of my friends who have all made the jump and haven’t looked back.

As a gamer you are probably interested in 3 main things, memory, processor and graphics card. In the past few years all three of these areas have been vastly improved in laptops, bringing them up to specification for proper gaming. Take for example this Sony Vaio, which sports  2GB of DDR2 memory, a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo processor along with a spanking 17″ screen. When you aren’t gaming then how does integrated HDMI float your boat, delivering High Def signals to compatible screens - told you these things had come a long way.

If you want to push things up a notch, or two, then you may want to consider this Toshiba offering,  which along with 2GB of memory, 17.1″ screen and 2.2Ghz Core Duo also comes with NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT and Harman Kardon five speaker sound system and Dolby Home Theater. This is one serious laptop for one serious gamer - hey it’s me, perhaps I should get it

Of course with any laptop you can of course connect it to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse giving you the best of both worlds - the typical office setup, or computing on the go. And of course most, perhaps all, laptops these days come with integrated wireless - I can see myself now getting some additional frags [that’s online kills for those not in the know] while enjoying a latte at Starbucks.  Of course people will still argue that the most powerful computing still comes from a desktop system, and they could be right, but the versatility offered by a laptop, combined with the ever increasing power make this a very attractive option.

To a lot of you out there, a mouse is just a mouse, they’re all the same, they all do the same thing, they click, they move, maybe scroll and that’s it! To a certain extent i would agree with you but if you are a die-hard PC gamer then you will know just how important the mouse is and a mouse is not just a mouse. Yes, to save yourself from “mouse-stickiness” frustration or delayed reaction rage you have to have a decent mouse when gaming on the PC and anything less than decent is just utter garbage. Well my gaming-happy little friends, Microsoft has once again saved the day and given us the ultimate gaming mouse.

The Microsoft Sidewinder Mouse should not be thought of as a mouse, it should be thought of as a tool, like a Knights sword or a Miners pickaxe. The Sidewinder fulfills all of the gamers needs. It has a resolution of up to 2000dpi and interchangeable Teflon feet for a smoother glide. It has three adjustable buttons on the top so you can switch cursor speeds live in any game which could come in very handy indeed! You can insert small weights into the body of the mouse to alter momentum, and reprogram all the buttons. It even has a little LCD display, the first of its kind on a mouse, it’s not really anything to boast about but it’s there!

All this may sound a bit extreme for a mouse (especially the weights, oh my!) but all you gamers out there will have a field day with this thing. Priced at around £40, it is not exactly breaking the bank and is cheaper than a lot of other flamboyant mice out there. Gamers should definitely take this into consideration.

So CES2008 is well under way and the technology blogsphere is full of the latest and greatest technology to be doing the rounds in 2008. What has caught my eye so far?

First up computer monitors and heck, it looks like flat screen monitors are so 2007 - the new kid on the block looks to be curved with Alienware showing off their offerings. For some, though, they will say that this is a beast in more than just features, given that it’s much thicker than a traditional LCD. The technology behind the monitor is Digital Light-Processing (DLP) which gives the monitor its bulk, however the curved nature is supposed to give the gamer a more immersive experince. I’m used curved displays before and I must admit they do provide a better experience in some circumstances, so I’ll be interested in how this takes off.

On the home cinema front, and specifically on the audio side of things, the big thing at CES was wireless speakers. I must admit, every time I need to install a new bit of kit in my cinema room I get so annoyed with the room full of criss-crossing speaker cables. So the minute I hear that we could finally be getting good quality wireless audio I need to sit up and pay attention. Today the only semi-decent solution is a one speaker solution, however Neosoniks solution, which uses an AV controller to help distribute the audio around all speaker systems. Again I’ll be keeping a close eye on this.

Finally, for now, how about High Def displays? Just when we were getting our heads out LCD vs. Plasma and the whole High Def story we start to hear about a new technology - OLED, or Organic Light Emitting Diode. The main feature of this technology is the ability to create an ultra thin High Def TV - and by thin, how about 3mm thick !

It’s interesting to hear that a lot of people come out and say that CES is getting more like showcase based around an evolution of technology, rather than a true revolution. Looking however, even at these three products above, I would say that in some cases we perhaps are on the edge of some kind of technology revolution - and that makes me a very happy geek !

A word of warning before I start - this post is a little bit off the gadget track, but given that most of us geeks spend a lot of time sitting down I thought it was important to address the balance and make sure we are all trying to keep fit. I, myself, have made a conscious decision to try and loose a bit of weight and at the same time get fit in 2008. Hang on, don’t I always say this on January 1st? Well yes I do, this year however I’m serious - honest.

Perhaps you are one of those people who pay out for an annual gym membership, or perhaps spend hours a week pounding the roads and country paths around your town. Well there is another way - and once again technology and gadgets can help you, whether you be into your rowing, running or weights. The ever increasing addition of technology to sports equipment now means that we have heart rate, calorie burn along with multiple automated programs that can turn you from flab to fab - well that’s the promise. It’s actually amazing how far multi-gyms have now come, and you can now get one that allows for up to three people to work out at the same time, you could almost start your own gym.

To be honest however, right now, I’m actually undertaking the Wii fitness program. Back in January 2007 I read an article about a guy who decided to setup his own fitness program using nothing more than the Nintendo Wii and a copy of Wii Sports. Well his results were pretty impressive, so as of 2nd January I’ve started the program myself. It consists of between 45 and 60 minutes of Wii play, and when I say play I mean pretty intensive play, mostly boxing. I’ll let you all know how its going later in the month.

Audio and video player designers, Sandisk, are setting their sights on Apple’s Nano with their new 32GB Sansa View MP3 player. The Sansa View has been available since last September in an 8GB and 16 GB form but they have unveiled at CES in Las Vegas this week that a 32GB model is here and they are pretty much ready to give the green light, launching it in the US in February with a $350/£175 price tag.

This massive increase in memory will mean you will be able to hold around about 50 movies!… so you definitely won’t be watching the same one twice that’s for sure. To make it even better there is a microSD expansion slot so you can have even more memory if you feel the need! Battery life is also pretty darn impressive with Sandisk claiming that the 32GB View will be capable of a 35 hour lifetime with audio or seven hours with video.

Along with the rest of the Sansa View mob, the 32GB version will come with a nice 2.4 inch colour screen and a very sleek, super cool design. Will this new 32GB Sansa View have Apple quaking in their boots then? Most probably not but this is a great little player with some terrific specs.