Probably ever since the first wheel was invented, people have rated their wealth by their possessions and how well they compare to others: in medieval times it was the number of wives you had, in the 1930s it was your radio, in the 60s it was colour TVs and now arguably it is your phone.

However, some interesting research suggests that in fact many of those who own fancy mobile phones are those that are further down the earning hierarchy than they may first appear and that there is one phone that suffers from financial deficiencies in its owners more than others: the iPhone.

Despite the logical inference that the high price tag would mean that only the wealthy could afford to buy an iPhone almost one in five iPhone owners in this survey admitted that their main account is always overdrawn, a statistic that is around double the national average of one-in-ten people.
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It sounds a little bit like something out of Star Trek or numerous other science fiction movies, but the two new figures that you will be able to see at Manchester Airport’s Terminal 1 are quite possibly the first really useful use of holographic technology here on British soil.

Using films of actual staff John Walsh and Julie Capper these two holograms can be seen standing by the security areas of the airport with the aim of assisting passengers with the increasingly complicated rules of what they can and cannot take on board the plane in an attempt to ease the workload of their real-life equivalents.
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The odds are that you will be reading this via a broadband connection, and if you’re not then you are probably watching this screen slowly load as you repeatedly bang your head against your screen at the frustration and annoyance that slow internet speeds nowadays cause.

It’s safe to say that broadband internet connections are brilliant and I’m sure everyone that saves those valuable seconds loading a page would like to thank the people behind it, but they are far from perfect and this is a quick look into the world behind broadband and the problems that the false advertising by the providers is causing. Although, it’s also worth bearing in mind that broadband speeds might vary depending on the time of day.

Firstly a recent survey carried out by ICM that showed that 90% of those surveyed found the advertising done by broadband providers misleading and confusing, mostly with the use of the phrase “up to” which generally indicates the speed if you happen to live right next to a phone exchange box in the middle of London, and 10’s of times faster than you will get in Cumbria – this then raises the question of whether rural broadband should be publicly funded.
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As gadgets start to get more expensive, more abundant and more conspicuous the probability of something going wrong likewise increases, and in fact I expect the vast majority of you have at some point broken or lost your digital camera/mobile phone/MP3 player or in fact, had it stolen, and unsurprisingly this has become a bigger problem in recent years.

Fortuitously for many years these problems have come under the banner of home contents insurance, but as they often come with high excesses and exclude items such as phones you could still end up out of pocket when you lose your gadgets — which is why gadget insurance has come about, and why moneymaxim.co.uk have created a comparison service to help you get the best deal.
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Here at Zath, we have looked at quite a few gaming headsets in the past such as the impressive Zowie Hammer and SteelSeries Siberia v2 but now one of the biggest names in the consumer electronics world have come up with their own two offerings for the gaming world: the Sony DR-GA500 and DR-GA200 Gaming Headsets.

Combining the latest in a whole range of sound technologies both of these have been designed from ‘extensive’ research into the market that they hope to make a mark on and so in theory these should closely resemble what people want from an ideal headset.

Firstly we’ll look at the DR-GA500 which is really the flagship model and the one that boasts the most impressive specifications, though I’m afraid you will have to excuse the mostly pointless jargon… this model combines a ‘Dolby Pro Logic IIx’ decoder with Sony’s own ‘Virtual Phones Technology’ (also known as VPT) to create “convincing 7.1 channel 3D surround effects”.
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