Filed under: Cellphones, Features

Our up-close experiences with mobile wizardry at Mobile World Congress this year have ranged from the mild to the wild, and today, we’ve got the whole range. Any guesses which are which in this particular batch, hmm?

Read – Motorola’s bargain basement MWC offerings
Read – Nokia’s S60 touch UI at MWC
Read – Polymer Vision’s e-ink Readius
Read – Nokia’s high-rolling N96

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Filed under: Laptops

You know how much we love SSDs around here, but getting one the legit way currently involves poking a rather large hole in your wallet — so we were pretty interested to see how a jury-rigged SSD built using that CompactFlash-to-SATA adapter we spotted a while back would hold up. While we probably would have sprung for something a little larger than the 4GB drives used in the test, the results are pretty encouraging: DIY SSD drives were overall faster than the 1.8-inch traditional drive found in the MacBook Air, and even a little faster than the VAIO TZ’s 64GB SSD. The drives were bested by a 7200rpm 2.5-inch drive and a 128GB SATA SSD, as you’d expect, but what we weren’t expecting was the negligible hit on power consumption — it looks like SSDs really don’t use less power, as the unchanged battery life of the SSD MacBook Air hinted. Still — you know we want one. Check out all the results and a little howto action after the break.

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Filed under: Gaming

We’re always a little skeptical of piracy impact numbers, especially when companies try to factor in things like “lost sales,” which can’t be adequately measured, but it’s still interesting to hear how large the hit is estimated to be — like Nintendo’s recent filing with the US Trade Representative that piracy cost it and its partners some $975m worldwide in 2007. Saying that the popularity of the Wii and DS makes Nintendo an “attractive target” for counterfeiters, the big N broke the problem down by region, highlighting its efforts to stem the tide and proposed solutions and regulations. We’d say that with profits soaring and plenty of people clamoring for hard-to-find systems, Nintendo could probably get back a little of that cash by finally getting some boxes on shelves instead of pushing for new laws, but hey — even Mario’s lawyers probably get sick of being paid in mushrooms.

[Image courtesy of Nick Cueva]

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Hosts: Steve Gibson with Leo Laporte

Microsoft’s Super Patch Tuesday, Macintosh updates, Adobe Acrobat exploit, Firefox patch, Vista SP-1, and more.

For 16kpbs versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve’s site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

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Running time: 1:08:59

LG are touting the KF700 slider as the world’s first mobile with three input/navigation methods. So what are they?

Well the 2008 MWC was the year that everyone got their touch on and LG sure didn’t let us down. The KF700 has a slick, although not particularly quick, touchscreen interface that emits a pleasant vibration in response to your tap – the latter being a particularly nice touch.

You can pan across the screen and scan through your contacts – a la the iPhone – as well as the keypad-like functionality of the 3-inch, wide-ratio touchscreen.

Second of this heralded trio, comes the navigation click wheel. As well as cycling through contacts and menus, it also can be activated as a shortcut to your favourite applications. This real-time widget works particularly well as it saves the hassle of trawling back through the screens to access, say, your contacts.

Finally comes the keypad. Wait, we’re counting the keypad? Yes, OK? we’re counting the keypad. Well that’s nothing to post a myspace bulletin about really.

The phone has a pretty standard 3mp camera, but it does interact very well when using the touch screen to view and organise your pictures.

So have a gander at the video – it’s our fifth this week from MWC – leave a comment and let us know what you think. Which handset has been the King of the Congress for you?