With Sky's new Wifi access you can take your home broadband connection with you to thousands of UK hotspots. You can get unlimited access from hotspots run by The Cloud. This is a service similar to BT Broadband, which also grant's you access to BT Openzone and BT Fon hotspots in the UK.
The qualify you need Sky's unlimited or fibre packages, and the one of the mobile apps for your device. The apps are available for iOS and Android. Once downloaded just sign in with a valid SkyiD to get started.
For more information and to downlod mobile apps check out the Sky Wifi webpage.
So here's a quick round up of each of these cloud services so you can get the most for your money (or free!).
Google Drive
Drive is Google's new product and brings the cloud storage of Google Doc's to all file types and sync's with your desktop using applications. Google is a late entrant into the cloud file storage market, but have been a leader for other cloud services, such as web mail, for a long time. Their Google Doc's is also pretty handy as you can edit documents from within a browser, with no need to download, edit and then upload. It just cuts out the hassle.
Dropbox
Dropbox is the most popular cloud storage system with 45 million users according to lockergnome.com. The service allows you to access your files through the slick web based UI or apps for computers and mobile devices. You can increase your free allocation of the storage space by simply completing the tutorial and then spreading the word with your friends, family and colleagues. Each sign up gets you both an extra 500MB of space!
SkyDrive
Microsoft's offering is fully integrated with their Office Web Apps system, which is like Google Doc's but actually Word, Excel etc. The system also features the app's for syncing and viewing content on various platforms. It also works with the Hotmail web mail service to help users transfer large files with attaching them to emails.
Comparison
The file storage options are compared below.
Google Drive is here... yes really! Google admit on their blogpost that Google Drive is about as rumoured as the Loch Ness monster, but it is finally here! With 5GB free storage, and up to 16GB with subscriptions, Google Drive is everything it was rumoured to be. It is fully integrated into Google Docs and works cross platform on all your devices.
Until now Microsoft's SkyDrive, Dropbox and Box.net have had the home and business markets covered for cloud storage, with many other companies offering increasing amounts of storage at various costs. The integration with existing accounts make it easy to apply for, although it's not quite available for everyone just yet. Google Drive will work with GMail in a similar way to SkyDrive and Hotmail.
Microsoft are advertising their web browser Internet Explorer 9 on television. This bring's the web browser battle to Google, who have been advertising on TV over the last year. The IE9 ad highlights some of it's features which windows users may not already use, such as adding a website link to the start bar. The ad also shows off the graphical capabilities by demonstrating the browser version of the popular smart phone game Cut the Rope.
The music in this commercial is "Too Close" by Alex Clare.
Do you use Internet Explorer 9? Feel free to post your comments below.
Apple's latest iPhone advert features Samuel L Jackson. Apple are really pushing Siri in a lot of different advertising campaigns at the moment, they obviously see Siri as one of their key unique selling points.
Share you thought's about Siri in the comments area below, or send a tweet to @webwarpblog.
NASA's lasts space shuttle, Discovery, has been transported in a historic final flight. The flight included a fly past Washington on it's journey to a museum. The shuttle program came to a close last year following the withdrawal of funding.
RockMelt is a Chromium based web browser that features integration with your social networks. Chromium is the open source project that aims to create "a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web". As Google Chrome is built on the same base code, the look of RockMelt is immediately familiar to Google Chrome users (which is well over a third of all internet traffic now).
RockMelt's selling point (it's free by the way) is that it supports integration with all the big social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube... the list goes on, and on... and on. The Facebook integration is impressive as it includes your news feed, friend requests, messages and Facebook chat, all in the browser window. The layout is shown below in the picture from their website:
To try RockMelt head over to www.rockmelt.com or for a more detailed review see below.
Google+ has had a facelift. This new design for Google+ seems inspired by Facebook's timeline user interface with posts appearing in chronological order on your page. These posts even live update while you are reading a post, pushing all other posts down (annoying?). Design notes from Facebook also include a new profile page redesign which features a larger cover photo and a small profile picture, just like Facebook. For design cue's from Twitter look no further than the "trending on Google+" area, which is very similar.
The page is generally a lot easier to navigate and feels more like a finished product than the first Google+ website. Integration with hangout and photos are easier to find because there is a new menu bar running down the left hand side of the website.
The fan pages/brand pages is largely the same, although these receive a cover photo too. The video below from Google shows the new website in action, or try it yourself by adding Web Warp Blog to your circles. Let us know your thoughts by commenting below or on Google+.
With Halo 4 still at least 6 months from it's release date of Holiday 2012 you wouldn't expect too much information about the game, but here's a quick round of what we know so far.
Halo 4 will be the first game in a new trilogy, set in the aftermath of Halo 3. It is rumoured to feature a new foe that will justify a new story line. You will be playing as the Master Chief himself and the game will feature that hugely popular multiplayer mode. There will also be a new multiplayer mode called Spartan-Ops, similar to Call of Duty's Spec-Ops, co-operative missions. These will be independent of the campaign story.
Halo 4 sports a new soundtrack composed by Neil Davidge. The games makers, 343 Industries, insist that they will keep Halo 4 true to the Halo series, but make it better in every way. New weapons, re-imagined old weapons and even a new ability, will all make for new and exciting game play for hardcore Halo fans and newbie's alike.
Feel free to comment below, and share your excitment for Halo 4! Web Warp Blog will keep you up to date with all the latest news, you can follow on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, so you never miss a post.
Chrome OS is famed for it's simplicity. It's just your Chrome web browser, on a dedicated computer. (plus a few extra's like wifi connectivity, battery life indicator, but it's still just Chrome). And then they added virtual desktops, so you could have your work and personal browsing on two separate full screen desktops. But wouldn't it be great if you could have smaller Chrome windows, like on a Windows PC or an Apple Mac? That wouldn't be very Chrome OS.... or would it?
The new version of Chrome OS is to include a.... wait for it... desktop environment, and a UI which allows for multiple Chrome windows to sized and positioned in the tradition Windows/Mac/Linux fashion. The screen shots online show some design cue's which will be very familiar to Windows 7 and Mac OS X Lion users! The below image shows apps arranged in the iOS style called Launchpad on Mac OS X Lion. The application shortcuts in the bottom left and the notification/clock area in the bottom right look very similar to Windows 7.
Apple have a long history of supporting the education system. Their latest project aims to revolutionise the textbook. All students, from starting school to gaining a PhD, use text books. These textbooks haven't changed for a long time... until now.
The iPad is changing the way student's conduct their studies. With the iPad you can carry around as many books as you need, without any increase in the weight of your bag. The Amazon Kindle store and Apple's iBook store both stock thousands of books. But these are just digital versions of paper books. With the hardware in the iPad the humble book is suddenly capable of so much more. This is why Apple have created a new standard for digital Textbooks, and it's built into iBooks 2, which is free on the App Store:
In these new text books you there are embedded 3D images, embedded photo gallery's and video content. They also give feedback on the multiple choice questions you get at the end of a chapter. For a preview of these features click here.
To create text books for the iPad Apple have created a new software package: iBooks Author.
It's a very cool iPhone mod, but quite expensive at $159! Perhaps this will make it as a standard feature for Apple's next generation iPhone and iPad models? It's a little flashy on a mobile device though, even for Apple. Check out the video below from iphoneforums.net. Other video's show that this is linked to the screen brightness settings, just like a MacBook.
Do you like this iPhone mod? Feel free to leave us your comments below.
Project Glass is a Google nod to the future, where glasses are the new mobile phone!
When mobile devices became location aware with support for GPS, compasses, accelerometer's and gyroscopes the app developers created Augmented Reality app's. These include directions, weather details and simply 'whats around me?'. Some of the more specific applications include details of the next hole in your golf round, distance, direction etc. or a virtual star map to help you identify stars in the nights sky.
Imagine this technology embedding in glasses! The future is coming....
It's April the 1st so don't trust anything in the news! This year Google have added a Quest Mode to Google Maps. This turns the world into an 8 bit quest, even street view is 8 bit! It's an easy Easter Egg to under cover, just head over to maps.google.com and click the Quest button in the top right hand side of the map.
8 Bit Quest version on Central Park, New York
The regular Google Maps view of Central Park, New York
