iPod shuffle voted top 'Chav Gadget'

Certified gadget obsessives Tech Digest and Shiny Shiny scour Gizmoville for the oddest digital goodies, TV Scoop features all that’s cool in British telly and Propellerhead answers your PC queries.

iPod shuffle is top Chav Gadget

Put on your Burberry scarf and switch on your iPod Shuffle. While the iPod nano may be the king of cool, a panel of the UK’s top gadget experts and the staff of Tech Digest and Shiny Shiny have voted its budget sibling the iPod shuffle this year’s ‘Must Chav Gadget.’

'The shuffle is perfect for chavs,' said the judge's citation. 'It’s cheap. It’s by a cool brand, and you can let others know you have one as it is designed to be worn round your neck. As it is white it also accessorises well with those classy gold chains Chavs wear.

The sad part is that the shuffle is the worst player in the Apple range – more like some dodgy back street knock-off than the excellent other iPods. The fact it has no screen so you can’t program it or choose a track – it chooses the music for you – also saves Chav brain cells for the much more important business of, ahem, ‘pimping their rides.’

Runner up in Chav Gadget of the year is the ultra skinny Motorola phone the RAZR. 'Once the height of cool, this has now become standard fixture for every Tom Dick and Chav. Motorola has done it pink, maybe they should be thinking of a Burberry version.'

It isn't all bad news for Apple though. The iPod nano scooped the Shiny Shiny icon award, and the same player was neck and neck with the Sony PSP in the race for Gadget of the year, as voted for by the wesbites’ readers, before the games console pulled away to win.

The gong for most indispensable mobile phone was won by the Samsung SGH-D600 and the most bling gadget which went to BabyPhat’s gold-plated £20,000 case for the Sony PSP.

The full list of winners are here.

New SPV launches

Over the past few years Orange’s range of Windows Mobile-powered smartphones – the SPVs - have gained something of a cult following. The latest in the series, the SPV C600, sports a similar candy-bar style and set of features to its predecessor the music phone the C550, but Orange has made a couple of significant improvements. The handset now boasts Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, which certainly speeds up menu navigation, and also the handset has a joystick control system as opposed to the slightly less usable rocker switches of its forbears. Other facilities include a 320 x 240 colour screen, a 1.3 megapixel camera and 64MB internal memory. Alas there’s no Wi-Fi and the phone is GPRS only in the UK, though it runs on EDGE in some other countries.

Ear muff phones

It’s one of life's trickiest decisions. It is freezing outside and you want to listen to your music player, but know those littler ear bud phones will do nothing too keep your ears warm. Fortunately Hammacher Schlemmer, the best named gadget shop in the world has the solution. It is offering neat little fleecey ear warmers combined with JVC speakers that let you listen to your music without your ears turning blue and dropping off. They'll cost US readers $35, UK shipping prices are available on request. Details here.

Propellerhead tip of the day - Speed up your PC by switching off indexing

This simple tip should help to speed up your PC by switching off the Windows XP Indexing Service. This runs in the background constantly checking through the folders and files on your drives to maintain an up to date index of its contents, it keeps the CPU busy and uses up a fair amount of hard disc space. You probably won't miss it, unless you make a lot of use of the advanced Search facilities but even if you do I'll show you another neat trick in a moment that will allow you to make use of the Index file already stored on your PC. All you have to do is switch indexing back on every so often to refresh the list. But first here's how to switch it off. Open My Computer, right click on your primary drive (you can do the others later) then select Properties and the General tab and uncheck 'Allow the Indexing Service to index this disk...' Click OK, select the All files and folders and files option and leave it to get on with it for a couple of minutes. Back now to making use of an existing Indexing Service file, If you want to find something in a hurry go to Search on the Start menu as usual and in the box 'A word or phase in the file;' prefix your search term with an exclamation mark '!' and watch it fly!

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