This is a great little challenge, especially if you want to take a know it all graphic designer down a peg or two.
The excellent Ironic Sans team have put together a twenty question quiz, presenting well known logos in both Arial and the original Helvetica to see if you can spot the difference.
Here’s how they describe the reasons for setting up the challenge:
Techradar is running an interesting piece about the mobile version of Spotify which was recently released for the iPhone and the Android platform (with more mobile versions on the way).
Noting that the majority of reviews for the iPhone version have been largely negative (5,985 of the current 9,164 reviews are a mere one star), they argue that punters just aren’t that keen on forking out £9.99 month, and the deal looks decidedly stingy when compared to what the BBC offers in return for the license fee.
And then there’s the BBC. If you look at the Beeb’s breakdown of where the licence fee goes, £2.01 per month gives you all the BBC’s radio output – that’s Radio 1, Radio 2, 40-odd regional stations, the specialist DAB-only channels, the Asian Network and the talk and sport channels – while a further £0.61 per month gives you online, which means podcasts, streaming and iPlayer.
£2.62 for the Beeb compared to £9.99 for Spotify? Suddenly Spotify doesn’t look quite so attractive.
Part of the problem is that in order to exist, Spotify has to pay the bills – and you can be confident that it’s paying rates that the BBC would laugh at. By all accounts the going royalty rate for streaming music is around 1p per stream, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you start getting lots of users.
One user listening to ten streams per day is 10p a day, or £3.00 per month – which means Spotify’s paying more than the BBC spends on its entire radio and online output.
We’re not entirely sure that it’s fair to compare Spotify with the BBC, but like a lot of others, we feel that the asking price of £9.99 per month is just a bit too steep.
Maybe it’s because we’re all a bunch of cheapskates, but if they made it a fiver we’d be in like a shot.
How much would you be prepared to pay for a service like Spotify?
Read the full story here
Palm Pre launch
As soft pre-launches go, this was akin to a cuddly teddy bear surfing a fluffy cloud chewing on a Wispa bar.
We found the Palm stall wedged into a tiny, dark booth of a Bloomsbury trade show with just one poster for decoration.
There was no publicity material on hand and just two Palm Pres available for passing journalists to play with. Yep, Palm can certainly do under-stated.
Admittedly, this wasn’t the Pre’s official launch, but we were taken back by just how low key they were prepared to go.
Happily, we got to have a good play on one of the phones and we weren’t disappointed – it’s a fantastic handset.
We’ll post up a full hands-on preview later, but don’t expect any photos. The Palm staff were under strict instructions not to let anyone take pictures of their new baby, citing its pre-production status and etched serial number as the reason.
We’ve been admiring the natty all-in-one lines of Asustek’s innovative new Eee Keyboard for some time, and it looks like we’ll be able to get hands-on with the love in October.
The Eee Keyboard cunningly wedges in a full computer and a 5-inch touchscreen, with the ability to connect (wirelessly or with standard cables) to a PC monitor, an LCD TV or a digital projector.
There’s also Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.0 and Ultra Wideband HDMI (UWB high definition multimedia interface) on board, plus USB 2.0, a VGA port, HDMI ports, and connections for headphones and microphones.
Powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Atom microprocessor, backed by 1GB of DDR2 DRAM and a 16GB or 32GB SSD (solid state drive), the Asus is set to run Windows XP Home Edition (although this may end up as Windows 7).
(Via IDG)
We know that there’s been hundreds of these Hitler video spoofs, but we liked this one more than most.
It’s stuffed full of naughty words, so sensitive souls click elsewhere!
We gave the web Fast Flip interface a go last night and declared it to be ‘pretty, but clunky’n’chunky‘ and the boffins at Google Labs have now added a mobile version of the news browsing site.
Available for iPhone and Android devices by navigating to the Google Fast Flip homepage on your phone, the interface serves up the same selection of screengrabs of news pages, with a simple homepage providing access to popular articles, sources, and topics.
Pages can be browsed by swiping left or right, with a zooming option providing a higher resolution version that’s easier to read on your squinty mobile screen.
We’re still not sure about this – if you’re viewing on anything less than a 3G connection it’s going to be a painfully slow way to get your news – and even then it can come down rather slow.
An unlimited data plan is also a must if you’re going to spend any amount of time on the site, as all those downloaded images will soon add up.
We’re not sure that we’ll be using the service much yet, but it is still in early beta though so we’ll be keeping an eye on how it develops.
We’ve no idea what we’d do with the thing, but Archos’s new 9-inch touch-screen tablet sure looks mighty purdy.
It won’t be hitting the stores until after October 22nd when the eagerly awaited Windows 7 OS comes out, but CNet has managed to grab some photos of the tablet-tastic beast.
There’s no denying that we’re loving the slightly futuristic lines of the Archos, but we’re not really sure if we’d ever use one.
How about you lot? Would you ever buy a tablet?
Straight out of their labs and strictly in beta, Fast Flip is one of Google’s wilder experiments, designed to let you access news articles quickly.
Here’s how they big it up:
One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!
Google blog
It looks quite fun but the problem is that all the pages are presented as images – meaning they take longer to download and you can’t copy and paste any of the content.
We think it’s fun, but a bit daft. Have a play here and tell us what you think!
Sadly, Postbot turned out to be even worse than WpToGo.
After installing the app on our G1 phone (a process that took some considerable time as the app took forever to download), it turned out to be buggier than Billy Bugeye sitting in a bucket of bulbous bugs, completely crashing out when an image was attached.
It seems our quest for a half decent Android WordPress client is set to continue.
Next stop: we’re going to try adding a post via the browser.
This is a test post from an Android G1 phone using the WpToGo mobile WordPress app. The interface seems pretty straightforward and simple to use, if a little clunky.
Let’s see what happens if I try and add an image from the G1…
Ah. The post appears each time, but I get an unpleasant Java error saying that the image wasn’t successfully uploaded.
That’s a bit annoying. Time to try the Postbot app next.
Welcome to Wirefresh (beta version)!
We’re a brand new site that’s going to be bringing you the latest news, comment and insights into developments in the tech world.
We’re a bit of a cynical, cheeky but enthusiastic bunch, so the site isn’t going to be the usual fluster of fanboy flutterings or reams of dull spec sheet regurgitations – we’ll give it to you straight from the heart every time.
The site is a spin off from the legendary urban75.com and will feature some contributors from its lively bulletin boards.
We’ve only just started, so please bear with us while we try to bend and twist the wordpress code into something that will delight your eyes, and set about filling the pages with wondrous content.
Coming very soon: a great new tech blog!
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