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unoTelly, a favourite of the EssentialMac team now lets you watch country specific content on sites such at Netflix, right here in the UK. Check out the full UnoTelly review for an indepth look.
Continue reading → How To Get Neflix USA in the UK, unoTelly is the answer.
No doubt like most I like some music in the background whilst I go about my daily business. This means I normally resort to firing of iTunes and selecting a radio station from there but it seems just a little bit big and cumbersome to have such a huge program lying in the background doing not a lot.
Enter Radium, which I confess I only recently found out about in the Freelance Mac App Bundle we are doing on our main front-page so I decided to give it a go
Continue reading → Review : Radium, a slim, menu bar based internet radio player
EssentialMac has been exclusively invited to take part in a beta of the Unotelly for Mac . UnoTelly gives you a way to watch region free TV. So in the UK you can watch hulu, USA viewers can watch programs on BBC iPlayer and so on and if you choose, watch a different countries netflix offerings no matter where on the planet you are.
Continue reading → UnoTelly – Let’s you watch Hulu and more in the uk
As you may or may not know most Apple applications come with what’s called universal binaries. A universal binary is an application that contains files for various incarnations of the OS X operating system and chip architecture for example32 or 64-bit. Needless to say this takes up space especially if you are an SSD user.
Continue reading → AOTD : Xslimmer helping you free space on your HDD
It seems that uncle Steve at the WWDC kept this little nugget of information nice and quiet.
In the new IOS five there will be the ability to use to volume up button on your Apple device to take a picture. In much the same way you can use the volume up button on the actual handset, it seems, that you can do exactly the same using your in-line headsets as well.
Of course you will need a pair of earbuds or third-party headphones that support Apple’s volume up and volume down functionality to get this to work (but whatever you do don’t get these LINK)
This feature is going to make those e-mail holding a camera at arms length shots become even more commonplace but I suppose it will take steadier shots as you can place your iPhone on a stable surface and snap away.
To say I’m a heavy sleeper would be somewhat of an understatement! At the moment my alarm is set for at least an hour before I wake up as I am one of those types who likes to hit the snooze button several times before even thinking about waking up. Awaken for Mac gets me out of my slumber with a choice a music or radio stations.
Shortly after posting our review for the Nuance Dragon Dictation Speech Recognition for iPhone Application this app has just appear on the iTunes store.
It turns your iPhone into a Wi-Fi connected microphone for dictation. The oddest thing about this application is that it’s designed to work with the PC application and not the Macintosh application.
Continue reading → Dragon Remote Mic lets your iPhone takes dictation for your PC
Mailtab is a nice small application for the Macintosh which is almost essential for any Gmail user who likes to check their email all the time.
Sitting nicely on your menu bar MailTab shows you when you have new e-mail in your account without having to rely on you checking your browser every time you want to see if you have mail. It also provides system notifications via growl and plays a nice little ditty when ever you do have new mail.
Continue reading → AOTD : MailTab – lightweight desktop Gmail app (osx)
It was many years ago that I first used the speed recognition software Dragon Dictation. Upon hearing about the world of speech recognition this was the making of a boy hood dream coming try, being able to tell my computer to do with the power of my voice alone.
Continue reading → Nuance Dragon Dictation Speech Recognition for iPhone Review
Browsing on a mobile phone had been something of a holy grail for me being the geek that I am. The thought of checking in with websites and keeping an eye on my business at the time seemed great but until the iphone came along, nothing really delivered.
Safari on the iPhone was a great leap forward in browser innovation, rendering in a full desktop experience, nothing came close to what Apple squeezed onto a phone, however, it’t not without it’s drawbacks, being cumbersome and a touch heavy on older iPhones.
Continue reading → Opera Mini 6 – A replacement for Safari on iPhone
One of the more basic features missing from the mail.app in pax is a simple “mark as read” command. Here’s a handy tip to make your mail.app a little more Gmail like.
Continue reading → How to mark an email as ‘replied’ in OSX mail
I’m not overly fussy or picky when it comes to technology but I do like to do a bit of research first, especially something that I use all the time. For example I wont purchase a cheap mouse or keyboard because “it’ll do” as that just stupid and headphones are no exception. Finding these Sony DR-EX300iP heaphones and checking out their 4 and 5 star review you’d think it’s a no brainer and for someone like me needing, no craving some better phones for iPhone I bought a set of these Sony DR-EX300iP with high hopes.
Continue reading → Sony DR-EX300iP In-Ear With Remote & Mic Worse than Stock Apple Headphones
Due to the remote location of my bunker that I call home, my choice of mobile phone providers is slim due to one antenna just down the road from me. You would think a mobile phone mast not a mile away from me would mean a great signal, no so, therefore forcing me to choose between Orange and Three.
With the Gevey Turbo sim I can take any sim and use it in my presently locked iPhones which is a bonus considering the contract limitations I’m working with
Continue reading → Gevey Turbo Sim for iPhone (including 02.10.04) Review
Here in the UK we live in the land of the Unlimited*. The asterix being all important as nothing is really unlimited, just fair and never really telling you how much you can use till mobile operators feel like charging you.
So when I heard about Onavo and it’s data shrinking abilities, I jumped at the chance to take it for a test spin for a few weeks.
The premise is very much like the Opera web browser application in many ways. In Opera, data is compressed by their servers before being sent to your phone. In short going through a clever proxy that compresses images just a little more than normal, doing funky things with CSS and generally doing a LOT to reduce data usage. Great for browsing when on a 3g signal and even makes using Edge more bearable, almost zippy in fact. The only downside is that Opera does all it’s clever stuff for Opera only and no other applications.
Onavo does this for all data and all apps by simply setting up an APN (access point name ) that uses your data plan. The idea being that when you are out and about you simply get more from your data. That’s the idea in theory. I did find a a flaw that I will go into later. The APN is fully signed and secure but is located in the USA. This does add to latency issues.
The app has one button, on or off, keeping things simple. Onavo knows when you are using a wifi network and doesn’t run when in that mode. During my testing period in areas where even getting an Edge signal is problematic Onavao had to be turned off as it was timing out all over the place. This is more than likely due to a combination of the Edge signal and the proxy being based over the seas which is going to have an impact on all data services.
With a full 3G signal all works as advertised. Websites are compressed along with most other data types like [pullquote_right]there are no savings when using Onavo whilst watching streaming video or on Wifi.[/pullquote_right]facebook, twitter and emails. For those watching the Gadget Show on Channel 5 (here in the uk) there are no savings when using Onavo whilst watching streaming video or on Wifi. All data savings show up in the application with a nice little graph and report to tell you what apps are sucking your precious data and just how much Onavo has compressed them. Again all very impressive.
Now I don’t imagine my data usage to be that out of the reach of most iPhone users, push email, gmail on the move, maps, facebook, twitter and a few other oddities now and again, each of them gave me a saving which was excellent BUT here comes the crunch.
At one point Onavo had used 300k of data but had only saved me 128k of data negating any savings it had made with other applications. Also the Gadget Show had it wrong about compressing data for live video streams
Taking a look at the Terms and Conditions (I did warn you earlier it’s scary reading) At least they are upfront about Collecting Personally Identifiable Information. Onavo stores and processes the information through a third party’s hosting services in the USA. I wonder why the vagueness of the hosts servers and information, what protection do we have especially with hacking being prevalent as it is.
In short if you read their terms and conditions there is a LOT of data gathering go about and they can and will keep some aspects of your data INDEFINITELY. Go look it up yourself if you don’t believe me..
Back to the app. I’m hoping that I can get to an area that has proper 3g signal for some more thorough testing shortly . The times that the airwaves bless me with 3g (no it;s not antenna-gate) there is a definitely a lag between using data services with the app running using my default APN, in this case orange.
I love the idea of this app and should I go abroad where every single minuscule byte of data can lead you to a re mortgage faster than you can update your face book, I’ll definitely consider using this if I can’t find a wifi point for day to day usage, Opera serves me well enough right now.
At the moment I’d like to be convinced but slow response times and an overly generous privacy page means this app will be up for review again.
A copy of this review has been sent to Onavo and hopefully, we may get a response?!?
However you look at it that’s some pretty impressive savings there by Opera. This is about a weeks casual browsing. Ok, so granted, Onvavo will compress more data but the Gadget Show got it wrong.Onavo will NOT compress data such as streaming video.
