The Best Reviews of E3 2013

June 17th, 2013Curious Stuff, Device Reviews, Tech News No Comments

E3 – Entertainment Electronics Expo – is always a pretty fun event. Folks looking to sell Macbook Airs, iPhones, Galaxy Note 2s, Xbox 360s and even paper printers head to E3 reviews to see what their lovely upgrade money will afford for them over the next few months.

Now, we’d like to say we sent a crack team of tech reviewers armed with dictaphones, HD cameras and splendid lexicon of tech lingo over to bring you the brightest and the best of E3. But to do that we’d need you to stop using our sell my mobile service for a bit to frr up the time, and that just seems countrproductive!

Here are a couple of bits of E3 news we’ve gathered from some of our favourite tech gossips sites and reviewers.

Forbes’ Best and Worst of E3 – A great way to pack as much in as possible. Forbes put together a nice simple best ‘n’ worst article to help you glide over news about the best indie video game and worst line delivered during game play (you’ll have to read it to find out – it was a corker!)

Engadget: The After Math – A nice round-up of this week’s gaming news, including plenty of titbits from E3 and this year’s WWDC.

Mashable’s Hands On with Our Favourite E3 Apps – Apps dont usually take centre stage at E3. But this year saw some brilliant mobile gaming software and apps hit the headlines.

Would you sell your iPhone for any of the tech at E3? Tweet us with your favouirtes at Money4Machines

3 Subjects to Avoid on Social Media

June 9th, 2013Curious Stuff, Tech-y Life Advice No Comments

Sometimes it feels great scream into a pillow at the end of a totally rubbish day. And do you know what the great thing is about that kind of rage release? Once it’s done, it’s done with. Here at Money4Machines, we spend our days processing the orders of folks like you doing the whole sell my mobile thing. And, yes, we must confess to the odd misspent break on Facebook silently judging the neediest and most annoying people on our Facebook feeds, too!

Here are three topics it can pay to avoid if you want to maintain a good image for your social media self!

1. Other people’s lives

Gossip may be bad for the soul… but it’s fun! At least, it’s fun from the safety of your own living room where you’re not really going to offend anyone by badmouthing their parenting skills behind their back. Shifty? Yes. Long-term damage? Probably not.

But slap that gossip on Facebook or Twitter and you’ve got a digital footprint that’s going nowhere! Feel free to talk about how Money4Machines helped you sell camera accessories or your old Nokia, but steer clear of bitchy opinions about how other people live their lives.

2. Work

Professionalism counts. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a CEO or a checkout worker, it matters. Work is a touch subject in social media, so just steer clear of any negativity. The odd “Man, I’m knackered!” is fine – it implies you’ve worked really hard – but “Man, I’m knackered because my boss is the devil!” doesn’t fly!

3. Your location

Facebook check-ins are great for smugly broadcasting the fact that you’re on a beach in the Maldives, but when you consider that 80% of burglars who took part in a survey here in the UK (we assume they were apprehended first!) said they checked the social media accounts of their intended victims, it might be worth not making it public knowledge that you’re out of the country or away from home for the night!

Google Unveils New Pull-a-Face Password Plans

June 7th, 2013Electronics Industry Chatter, Tech News, Tech-y Life Advice No Comments

We all make them. Funny faces. We often make them at our smart devices, consoles and laptops whilst using them. And now the lovely Google has stepped forward and created an app that makes great use of your funny face pulling skills (not the ability to pull people with funny faces!) for purposes of security.

Google recently filed a patent for a security app that requires users to pull any of a series of faces to verify their identity. Designed for Android phones, it’s hoped the new feature will be less easily duped by things like photographs.

The app seems to work in two steps – verifying the owner’s face and then verifying that they carry out the correct funny-face request, e.g. wiggling their eyebrows, sticking their tongue out, closing their eyes, wrinkling their nose, etc.

Loads of our customers love to sell mobile handsets to fund an upgrade to the latest Android handset. So, when can our sell my mobile customers expect to see the new Google Andr0id security feature? Well, not in the near future, that’s what the experts say. At the moment, there are too many issues with biometrics technology to make the app an effective weapon, but we’ll keep you posted on any new developments!

 

New Xbox One Will Be Great for the Second-Hand Market

May 21st, 2013Device Reviews, Tech News No Comments

Image courtesy of Sony

 

The Xbox 360 is an exceptional console. Even our non-gamer, cat-loving marketing lady has an Xbox 360 so she can relive her teen years playing Monkey Island Special Edition.

Today, Sony announced the specs of their new games console – the Xbox One – but were a little cloudy about a release date. We don’t expect  them to throw out all the candy at once, so more details at E3 in July should be forthcoming.

Xbox One Specs

Never mind about witty little comments for the moment. Here are the specs for the new Xbox One in the form of a nice list.

  • 8GB DDR3 RAM
  • 500GB harddrive
  • X64 8-core AMD CPU
  • USB3.0 ports
  • Blu-ray drive
  • 803.11n Wi-Fi plus Wi-Fi Direct for connectivity between devices
  • HDMI-out AND HDMI-in (included for TV viewing i.e. interfacing with your digibox, essentially meaning you only have to use the one device)
  • Built-in Xbox Kinect V2 (just say “console on” to turn on the Xbox from any state)
  • New controller (which is really the old one with a bunch of great improvements)
  • Game disc will be Blu-ray and only made to be used once. After you’ve installed the game it will be linked to your Xbox Live account. Xbox Live has also been updated to add more than 280,00 new servers.
  • Games – The first to hit the new Xbox will be new offerings from FIFA and COD. You can read more about what will be on offer here.
So why will this console be great for folks like you looking to sell consoles for cash? It’s a bit sucky of Sony, but they’ve been clear that the new Xbox One will NOT be compatible with ANY Xbox 360 games, meaning your Xbox 360 will still hold its value.
So, money, money, money. No word as yet on a price, but given than the specs and detailed feature reviews are high end (who feels like a loser now, Nintendo Wii U!) you can expect to shell out a fair wack. Our advice? Do the whole sell my mobile thing with us and start saving!
We’ll give you an update in July once all the tasty tech treats start to roll in from E3!

 

 

GeekDad’s Data Free Weekend Advice to Wired Readers

May 4th, 2013Curious Stuff, Tech-y Life Advice No Comments

This cat is also going data-free!

Leaving the country. For many Money4Machines customers that means rationing a piddling data bundle to try and stay in contact with your favourite Instagram, Facebook and Twitter feeds. After all, what day is complete without seeing what your mates back home have been eating for lunch?

For our favourite tech blogger, GeekDad, leaving the country ended up meaning going data-free (so pretty much device-free) once the frantic purchasing of local SIM-cards, borrowing of unsecured Wi-Fi and apparently even a Wi-Fi-sniffing trip to McDonalds didn’t pay off.

So he did it. He turned off the data on his iPhone.

A week back from his holiday and GeekDad realised he still hadn’t turned his data back on. For us this raised the same question – how much access is too much access?

Seriously, how many times each day do you NEED to check Facebook or browse new Pins on Pinterest? We put it to the test here in Money4Machines HQ and found that controlling your data bundle is actually pretty empowering.

Sure, apps like WhatsApp are only accessible when your smartphone data is switched on, but how many ways do you really need to be contactable? When we process your sell for cash order and sell my mobile quotes, we sometimes ask a few questions about things like data use and so on. We really only do it out of interest so we can report back to our blog on any interesting trends.

One of the main reasons you want to keep your data turned on seems to be ease of use. Great. GeekDad agreed and suggested a solution – an app that turns your data on/off without the usual navigation through settings. Another reason is that you’ve got unlimited data with your contract so you may as well use it. But what if you could monitor your data use and cut your bills by giving up that unlimited bundle for a cheaper option?

Let us know what you think in the comments section and we’ll keep you updated on any splendid little apps that pop up to help you turn your data on/off.

NASA Discovers Two Water-Covered (and Potentially Habitable!) New Planets

April 20th, 2013Curious Stuff, Eco Living No Comments

Okay, so it’s not strictly about helping you sell mobile devices, but we do love a good space story here at Money4Machines! And our buddies over at NASA recently released some very exciting info about the potential of two newly discovered planets to support life.

Stephen Hawking has said the human race won’t survive another thousand years on Earth because there are too many people who over-fill their kettle, desolate landscapes in the quest to gobble natural resources and pretty much make a mess of the place. Bottom line – the human race need to colonise space in order to survive. (There’s some stuff about how a lot of us need to die first too, but that’s another story!)

And with that sunny thought in mind we turn to NASA and their latest bit of gossip on space exploration. According to the celestially obsessed scientists, a few solar systems over, there’s a pair of MASSIVE planets that are completely submerged in water with a surface landscape not dissimilar to Earth’s, e.g. rocks and stuff.

The planets orbit a star called Kepler-62 in the Lyra constellation. you can read more indepth details from our mates over at Wired.co.uk.

Would you sell your iPhone (and the other few million devices you’d need to sell to afford the trip!) to secure a one-way ticket to a new planet? Once you’re finished doing the whole sell my mobile thing on our quotes page, let us know here in our comments section.

Invisibility on the Way for Mobile Devices?

April 8th, 2013Curious Stuff, Electronics Industry Chatter No Comments

Not everyone wishes they had the power of invisibility. What are we saying? Of course they do! But the skill would be somewhat tarnished if you had to wear some great bulky contraption to make it happen. Even Harry Potter had a bit of trouble with that voluminous cloak.

So for most folks, the bottom line would probably be that a cloak-like piece of clothing is fine, so long as it’s lightweight and not too humiliating and doesn’t require you to be naked underneath. And what does this have to do with helping you to sell your iPhone? Not a darn tootin’ thing, but it is pretty interesting so here goes.

Our buddies over at the University of Texas have developed what is essentially a type of invisibility cloth just micrometers thick. The cloth basically works by diverting microwaves and rendering the wearer (or their big tank!) invisible to things like radar. Ok, so it’s not going to help you sneak past your boss to pinch the good biscuits that she keeps for guests, but researchers say it could end up being a way to cloak small devices like smartphones in everyday life.

For those with slightly more finely tuned brains, you can read a great article about the science of the development here. Still only interesting in the whole sell my mobile thing? We too have had our fill of science for the day, so we’ll see you at the quote page to help sell Samsung, Apple, Nokia and any other devices you’ve got lying around (go on, give us a treat with something like an LG Prada!)

The Facebook Phone – Is That a Thing Now?

April 3rd, 2013Device Reviews, Electronics Industry Chatter, Tech News No Comments

Fairly continuous reruns of 30 Rock mean Money4Machines HQ is now packed with Lemon-isms like “Is that even a thing” and the classic “Blurg!” But anyways, back to today’s little titbit of tech gossip from the glorious web chatterverse – the Facebook phone.

HTC are rumoured to be the developers behind Facebook’s first phone. We’ve read a bunch of project code names – “Myst” and “Home” the most common, but whatever the handset is called, we want to know more about it.

Facebook is due to announce the new handset and some nifty software that can turn any Android phone into a Facebook-led handset. In fact, they’re due to announce all their new toys tomorrow, so we’ll update you when you visit us to sell Samsung handsets or sell Nokia bits and bobs then!

Mashable are really, really good with specs and have a heap more leaked images than we do, so follow this link and have a read for yourself.

So, would you sell iphone 5 devices and make to switch to Android if it meant you could have a Facebook born and bred smartphone? We asked some of today’s sell my mobile customers if they’d consider dropping Apple in favour of a Facebook-led Android device. There will always be those diehard Apple fans who won’t but the younger crowd seem pretty interested in a Facebook-themed handset.

 

 

4G Auction Brings in £1 Billion Less than Expected

February 20th, 2013Curious Stuff, Electronics Industry Chatter, Tech News No Comments

According to Ofcom, the recent UK auction of 4G services raised £2.34 billion. While that’s a sum most of us would be happy to retire on, Ofcom also admitted that the figure is around £1 billion lower than originally forecast (around £3.5 billion)

Everything Everywhere (EE), Vodafone, Niche Spectrum Ventures (BT subsidiary) and O2 (Telefonica) and Hutchinson 3G shared the mantle of winning bidders.

So what went wrong?

Back in 2000, a similar auction of 3G services raised a massive £22 billion. But according to economists, that was due to the vast difference between 2G and 3G products. Our own Money4Machines mobile tech wizards said,

“Going from 2G to 3G was like an unimaginable daydream – browsing while I walk! But going from 3G to 4G isn’t really a priority for most folks. When people sell mobile phones and trade in tablets with us, it’s not usually because they need 4G. They don’t think ‘hey, I have to sell my mobile because I just can’t wait any longer for these cat gifs to load!’ Super-fast mobile broadband just isn’t a priority for most people.”

What do you think? Would you sell your mobile and upgrade just to access faster browsing speeds? Let us know what you think and we’ll Tweet your responses (as long as there are no rude words!)

WhatsApp, You Sneaky Devil!

January 29th, 2013Curious Stuff, Tech News, Tech-y Life Advice No Comments

We all pretty much live and breathe in the form of avatars and online personae, and that means a certain amount of stickiness when it comes to internet privacy. Do you trust all apps to handle personal details appropriately? How would you know if they didn’t?

We reported yesterday on the 14,000+ tech patents registered last year, and a huge proportion of those are apps for your smart devices. Do you know who has access to your details?

Back in May 2011 it was reported that WhatsApp wasn’t doing everything in it’s power to keep your messages private. A flaw in the software left the app open to hacking, and since they weren’t bothering to encrypt messages, it meant your little missives were easily hackable and readable by anyone with the skill to exploit the loophole. Bottom line, it’s not the first time WhatsApp has got into hot water over privacy.

But this time things are a little more official. The service has been criticised for requesting access to registered users’ contact address book and then recording all user details, including those of people not signed up to WhatsApp. Only iPhone users were given the option to add contacts manually, therefore missing out the folks who hadn’t signed up to WhatsApp. But before you sell Samsung devices or head to Money4Machines‘ quote page to sell mobile phones not running iOS, it’s worth remembering that since this news has come to light, it’s likely WhatsApp will be forced into making changes.

When we arrived to start all your ‘sell my mobile‘ quote orders this morning, WhatsApp still hadn’t commented on the story as it swept across tech news websites, but we’ll keep you posted on any developments that pop up over the next few days.

 

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