‘Let The Right One In’ Review
Let The Right One In (15)
Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar
Director: Tomas Alfredson
Running time: 115 minutes
This Swedish production captures a beautiful friendship with very few words. Based on the novel, Let The Right One In will not fail to spark something in you – whether it is sheer disgust or, more simply, an incredible feeling of connection between two innocent souls.
The director, Tomas Alfredson, has done a splendid job in making sure everything that you see is atmospheric and eerie. Wide shots, long pans and a lot of stillness (mostly depicting the white snow) all add to the dark nature of this vampire flick. Our hero Oskar is a shy 12-year-old boy, very blonde and very enclosed. He has no friends at school and is frequently picked on by some bullies.
They steal his clothes and are sure to be as nasty to him as children can be when unsupervised. Oskar’s loneliness is something that is echoed in amongst us all; we all know what he’s going through and have felt such anger at such a young age. His only solace appears one night whilst he’s stabbing a tree releasing pent up frustration with a knife, in the form of Eli.
Continue reading »PS3 Motion Sensor Controller At E3?
With E3 on the horizon, rumours are bound to be popping up. This one talks of a motion sensing controller for Sony’s Playstation 3.
There have been reports that someone has seen a working prototype of the Sony motion sensor controller which is set to make an appearance at E3 this year in June.
Continue reading »Intel Given Record Fine By The European Union
Their competitors can’t beat them, the public continue to buy from them, but yet again the European Union (EU) Competition Commissioner has brought the big guns down to size, and this time it’s the turn of Intel to follow a long line of companies (that include the like of Microsoft) and suffer their wrath.
But this $1.45 billion (over £950 million) fine is the biggest that we have seen yet, and it comes as a result of claims suggesting that Intel were using “illegal practices and rebates” to squeeze their main competitors AMD out of the market.
This EU Antitrust fine is the biggest that has ever been imposed and a single company, and although it will be by no means devastating, it’s is still significant and will somewhat tarnish Intel’s record and Intel have unsurprisingly taken exception to this, citing that although they will abide by the laws they object to the decision.
Continue reading »Cooliris iPhone App Review
Not content with enriching your desktop/laptop browser-based photo viewing, Cooliris have now come up with the Cooliris iPhone app which promises to bring similar functionality to Apple’s big name smartphone.
We recently wrote about the latest version of the Cooliris 3D photo wall which allows you to browse various online photo galleries on some of the biggest websites on the Internet using a very cool looking and easy to use 3D wall interface – if you haven’t used it yet, I’d definitely recommend you take a look, it looks great!
Continue reading »New York Times To Charge For Online Content?
If you start to look at who has suffered most from the growth of the internet over the last decade then the first thing you would probably think of would be the music industry, which is surprising as you would have thought that Newspapers would have been hit the hardest (who needs to pay for news when you get it for free on the internet?).
However thanks to a combination of tradition, wanting to have news ‘on the go’ and numerous other reasons they have managed to hang in there, and the industry would appear to be still going strong, the vast majority also have thriving websites.
But unfortunately for the newspapers their popularity is declining, and the most obvious solution would be to exploit the capabilities of the internet and generate revenue via online means as well as (or maybe in the future instead of) the paper version.
Google Chrome TV Advert
Have you seen the Google Chrome advert? Yes that’s right Google have stepped into the medium of TV advertising for the first time in an effort to publicise their Google Chrome web browser which they launched in September 2008 stating that they wanted their own custom browser developed to allow the optimal, high performance running of all of Google’s online services and applications (as well as all the other websites on the Internet).
Many saw it as the pre-cursor to a Google O/S (now perhaps more in conjunction with Android) to challenge Microsoft and Apple at their own O/S game or even move beyond it, however given Chrome’s current very low market share of the browser market (just 1.4%), this is perhaps why Google are now starting to more aggressively push their custom browser – just the other day I spotted a big graphic advert for it on the frontpage of Google.co.uk.
Continue reading »Top 5 ‘Make Your Own Morph’ Animations
You may remember that about six months, we featured the Make Your Own Morph kit which we thought would make the ideal gift for any budding animator or just anyone who remembers the stop-motion early classics that were featured on Tony Hart’s TV art show – I remember watching those Morph animations after school as a kid myself! Great times!
What made this ‘My Own Morph’ kit event better was the fact that it was a usable plasticine model with which you can create your own stop-motion animations and upload them to the official Wallace and Gromit website for everyone else to watch.
Continue reading »HTC Magic Review
Vodafone have released the HTC Magic, but the question is, have they got their exclusive hands on a “magical handset”? Back in February as part of our smartphones series we had a look at the T-Mobile G1 which was the first to have the much hailed Google Android operating system, and although the O/S was impressive the hardware wasn’t; but now it is time for the second wave of Android phones, and the first of them is the HTC Magic.
The Taiwanese telecommunications company have been on the rise recently with the HTC Touch HD, Pro and Diamond all receiving acclaim and success. So who better to have a crack at getting the best out of Android; and let’s face it they couldn’t do any worse could they?
Continue reading »Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2 Trailer
A new Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2 trailer has gone live over the Internet after the previous Call of Duty 6 teaser trailer.
This trailer was shown in the US during a basketball game, and it’s now available for everyone to see, and it looks awesome!
The scenes in the trailer are set in a few places such as what looks like a Russian base in the snow, scuba diving underwater and a snowmobile chase which looks reminiscent of Call of Duty games gone by, which had you shooting out of a moving vehicle on roads. Of course, the gunship mission is thrown in there for good measure, just like the mission in the first Modern Warfare.
Continue reading »Carphone Warehouse Buy Tiscali To Become Broadband Leader
As you can imagine the broadband industry is a big market – one that currently has around 15 million ‘users’ and that is a number that is rapidly expanding, so when two of the top five providers come together it is definitely worth looking at.
Carphone Warehouse (or more specifically ‘Talk Talk’, the telecommunications part of the company) is set to be the biggest provider of Broadband access in the UK after a £236 million buy-out of Tiscali’s UK arm, assuming EU competition regulators give it the green light.
Continue reading »Amazon Kindle DX Revealed
What do you do when you’ve made the leading product in the market, you’re onto your second version and you’ve sold an estimated 500,000 units? Make it bigger of course – and that is what Amazon have done with the Kindle DX which was released this week.
Back in February we saw the release of the Amazon Kindle 2 and now it’s back, with an extra 3.7” of screen size, a host of extra features, and a load more publishing partnerships that promise to widen the range of texts available on the Kindle.
So, what makes this different from the previous Kindle? Well the most obvious thing is that it is a significant amount bigger (9.7” as opposed to 6”) which makes using it a lot more practical: you need to turn the page less which is an advantage if you’re just skimming through, you can have bigger text and it’s better for sharing with other people.
Continue reading »Call of Duty 7 Rumours?
There always seems to be some news on a Call of Duty game these days, what with two companies, Activision and Treyarch, developing the games so they can release one each year. With Activision currently working on Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2 (release date – Nov 2009), there’s no doubt Treyarch will be back with Call of Duty 7 in 2010.
The latest on the grapevine is about where the next Call of Duty game (after Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2) is going to be set in terms of combat arena.
Going by recent reports, Call of Duty has finished with World War II, with Treyarch “glad to end World War II in World at War.”
Continue reading »Boxee Media Center Review (Windows)
Labelled as the first ever ‘Social Media Center’, Boxee is an open source programme that aims to open up the world of music, video, TV and the internet in an easy to use way. We’ve managed to get our hands on a private invitation to the Windows version of Boxee – so we thought we’d have a good look around and see what the rest of you have got in store!
When you first open up Boxee and login you are confronted with a sleek and stylish layout – the learning curve for navigating this system is almost nonexistent as it is intuitive, quick and easy with both the mouse and a remote – which is a relief as there is quite a lot to navigate:
Continue reading »Football Manager Live Voucher Code (5% off)
We’ve been big fans of the Football Manager (FM) games over the years and when Sports Interactive released their online Football Manager Live (FML) game we had to get signed up and get playing, how I wish they’d be a Football Manager Live voucher code back then!
That was 6 months ago and we’re still paying our monthly subscription and playing our football matches against all sorts of randomly named teams – so it certainly has some staying power for most of us!
Continue reading »Ghostbusters Game Delayed?
It looks like the much anticipated Ghostbusters video game will be delayed again…well for all consoles apart from Sony’s Playstation 3 and Playstation 2.
Sony have snuck in at the 11th hour to steal the rights for the PAL Playstation release of the Ghostbusters game (on the 19th June 2009) to coincide with the release of the 25th Anniversary Ghostbusters Blu-Ray release, which is released 4 days earlier on 15th June 2009.
Continue reading »Webby Awards 2009
Back in March we had the Gaming BAFTA Award Winners 2009, the awards that celebrated achievement in the gaming world; but that’s not the only computer orientated awards out there – the internet also has its own awards ceremony that rewards those that have stood out in the world of the web, the Webby Awards.
And yesterday was the date for the 13th Annual Webby Awards and with just under 70 categories from ‘News’ to ‘Best Use of Typography’ and from ‘Banking/Bill paying’ (I know, one category for both, ridiculous! :p) to ‘Weird’ there really is an award for everyone.
However, I think it’s important to point out the major flaw with these awards before I go on, and simultaneously explain why Zath.co.uk hasn’t won any. It was of course because we were not entered as both a pay-on-entry and pay-on-attend policies are in effect and although both generate revenue, both also put off some of the smaller websites that may otherwise win awards.
Continue reading »Norton Internet Security 2009 Competition
Virus protection and Internet security is one of those things which is one of those things which we all know we should do something about, but many of us don’t do it or at least not very well – in fact this was on of the areas we first covered here at Zath when we wrote about stopping viruses, spyware and adware…aka being able to use your pc again!
With that in mind, I thought that this latest competition might prove useful to plenty of you out there!
Symantec have kindly given Zath ten copies of the latest version of their Norton Internet Security suite which rather than just being a simple anti-virus product like many programs out there, it features a whole host of protection for your Windows computer including:
Continue reading »Windows 7 RC Download
Well after much speculation over the official announcement that the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC), 5th May 2009, the day has arrived and you can now head on over the Microsoft Windows 7 Beta website and get yourself a Windows 7 RC download in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours – (officially known as build 7100).
I was a little apprehensive over the actual process of downloading a copy of the Windows 7 RC after Microsoft had “issues” with its servers when it first opened them up for the Windows 7 Beta download – However I must say that I was quite impressed when it only took me around 3 hours to download the full 3GB or so of the Windows 7 RC ISO image (which you then burn onto a blank DVD). Even on my humble rural-based ADSL broadband connection I have managed to download it fairly quickly – mind you this was before 2pm GMT, perhaps you Americans out there hadn’t all got up by then? 
Wii Motion Plus Release Date
Well it seems like a long time ago since Nintendo first announced their Wii Motion Plus system as an improvement to their already successful motion-based control system for the Nintendo Wii console – and indeed it has been a long time, it’s nearly a year since E3 2008 at which it was first announced, but we’ve finally got word of the Wii Motion Plus release date.
I don’t personally have a Wii, but have played on them in the past and have been quite impressed by what they are capable of, however until I saw the videos over on our original coverage of the Wii Motion Plus system, I wasn’t aware of the limitations of the Wii motion sensors – mainly that it was only able to differentiate large sweeping movements, but then most games to date had been designed with this constraint in mind, so you may not have noticed it that much.
Continue reading »IWOOT Voucher Code (5% off)
We’re big fans of hi-tech gadgets here at Zath and it’s always great to find a bargain or discount, so here’s another, this time it’s an IWOOT voucher code (5% off) offer which means that you can make a saving when ordering with ‘I Want One of Those‘ no matter what size order you’ve got.
IWOOT (as they are often know as by us gadget fans) or ‘I Want One of Those’ is one of the more established gadget retailers here on the Internet and one that I’ve used on many occasions to get some great gadgets that have entertained us for hours. If you haven’t heard or used them before, I’d suggest heading on over there and taking a look as they do have some great products and even have next day delivery.
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