Nokia has announced that it will make all GPS-enabled Nokia devices allowed to access for free its Ovi Maps service - including turn-by-turn navigation and city guides -to over 74 countries in 46 languages. Previously, Nokia has limited basic map navigation for those using it for free, and turn-by-turn navigation and city guides were additional extras.

By making this free, according to Executive Vice President Anssi Vanjoki, he hopes to make Nokia the largest manufacturer of GPS-enabled devices, like cameras, by making this feature for free.

"“By adding cameras at no extra cost to our phones we quickly became the biggest camera manufacturer in the world. The aim of the new Ovi Maps is to enable us to do the same for navigation," Vanjoki said.

This is seen as a move to better compete with rivals Apple and Google in the smartphone market. Both Apple and Google use Google Maps for their GPS navigation.

Starting today, only ten Nokia phones - including the Nokia N97 Mini, 5800 XpressMusic and E72 - will be able to download the new software; but that is set to be expanded eventually. In March, the company will ship the new Ovi Maps software pre-installed on new GPS-enabled Nokia devices, with the maps of the country and city guides from Lonely Planet and Michelin already present in the software.

Other devices that will be able to download the latest update immediately are the 5800 Navigation Edition, E52, E55, 5230, 6710 Navigator, 6730 Classic and the X6.

RUMOUR MILL: The hotly rumoured Apple Tablet device is said to make its way to Verizon when the device is set to be release by Apple in the Spring or Summer, according to The Street. This comes after news of the tablet will feature a Qualcomm-produced wireless chip that would work on the CDMA network.

The device will also not be running Qualcomm's SnapDragon processor, despite it being used in a crop of new mobile devices, including the Nexus One. Previously rumoured, the device will run on a processor made by Apple's P.A. Semi.

This will see Apple moving away from AT&T, as both companies have had an exclusive deal to sell the iPhone device since its inception. This could be because of Verizon's 3G network being in more locations than AT&T or any other telco in America.

Apple have today released the best thing for Windows users - updated Bootcamp drivers for their Windows 7 installation on their Mac. While this will be of big relieve to those who use Windoze Windows on their Mac, the following models have been classed as unsupported:

iMac (17-inch, Early 2006)
iMac (17-inch, Late 2006)
iMac (20-inch, Early 2006)
iMac (20-inch, Late 2006)
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2006)
MacBook Pro (17-inch, Late 2006)
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2006)
MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2006)
Mac Pro (Mid 2006, Intel Xeon Dual-core 2.66GHz or 3GHz)

Jump on over the almighty fruits website and download the goods: 32-bit and 64-bit. For those of us who have been holding off upgrading from Vista (ugh) to 7, a Boot Camp Upgrade Utility has been created to help with the upgrade. Get it here.

Happy driving...

Ever wanted to play a fighter game such as Tekken 2 with a Massage Vest? No? Of course you haven’t but now you can thanks to a student project first thought of in 2007.

The vest, dubbed the “Massage Me” has been shown at several electronic exhibitions and has been given a lot of praise. The device is very simple, the controls are scattered in patterns over the vest which you must massage to input that button. Although there is currently no support for any other games (old or new), it does give the peripheral a step ahead in advancement. Who knows, this could be the future of gaming?

The “Massage Me” even has it’s own Website with information, videos and a DIY of the controller.

Seven has launched its new Catch-up television service - dubbed "PLUS7", offering streaming of shows including Castle, Home and Away, Criminal Minds, Heroes, Private Practise, Flash Forward and Parks and Recreation - with more content expected to be added from this year's television season.

However, the new catch-up service will follow the US method of placing advertising in the middle of shows, though there is no indication on which part of the stream. While Ten has placed ads where the ad breaks go in programming, it is usually because they broke the episodes up. As well, expect to see between 3-4 ads per show.

Content expiration does differ - those on NBC usually end ten days after appearing online; while ABC (US) shows stay up for 28 days. However, shows from Seven - including Home and Away - expire for 7 days. ABC iView offers all shows up for 14 days after broadcast.

While iiNet and Internode have offered to bring ABC iView unmetered, no word if they will extend that to this service.

"At this stage we're not offering Plus7 unmetered to our customers," an iiNet spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

No other ISPs have announced any similar deals.

Little late on the bandwagon, but Apple has confirmed that there will be a press event on January 27 at 10:00AM Pacific. Location has also been confirmed to be at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theatre in San Francisco. While we're not going to speculate what is going to happen, do you think an Apple Tablet announcement could happen? Or maybe a new iPhone OS 4.0?

Oh, and by the way, those who need to know when this happens in Australian time - that would be 5am AEDT on Thursday.

Source: Engadget (thanks for the pic too)

And we're back with something new. Thanks to Stewart, we are getting back into the podcast game, though we are going to do this monthly. Yeah, I know, a monthly podcast. Basically that would mean that we would basically catch you up with an entire month's worth of news in a 30 or so minute show, and thanks to Stewart's wonderful (or infamous) editing skills, we did just that.

The episode basically covers CES and the first few day's of news; and this was recorded a week before the Google incident - but we'll cover it on the next episode, hopefully. See you in February!

Download - MP3

Warning: the following episode has a sample rate of 16Khz - blame Stewart or Audacity for the encoding, we hope to fix that in later episodes... hopefully. Show notes after the jump.

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Intel has announced that has made a net income of $2.3 billion during the fourth quarter of 2009, making that a 875 percent increase of its earnings last year, a dismal $234 million in Q4 2008, beating the Wall Street projections.

The largest chipmaker also announced that it has posted revenues of $10.6 billion during the quarter, up by 28 percent from last year and up 13 percent from last quarter.

It also posted an operating income of $2.5 billion; and while it was up 62 percent from last year, it was down quarter-to-quarter by 3 percent.

While its revenue continues to come mostly from the Asia-Pacific region, with 57 percent of the revenue; the Americas region made up 20 percent of the revenue, while Europe and Japan made 14 percent and 9 percent of the revenue respectively.

However, for the entire year, its revenue was down 7 percent to finish $35.1 billion, from $37.6 billion from 2008; and its net income was down 17 percent, to $4.4 billion. This could be because of a European Commission fine of $1.45 billion and a settlement with rival AMD of $1.25 billion; along with revenue was down in its groups, with the exception of the Intel Atom processor revenue as that increased 167 percent.

It predicts revenue to be $9.7 billion in the first quarter of 2010, which is above estimates from Wall Street; and with more and more companies releasing their numbers, hopefully we see the end of the economic downturn.

Image from: Josh Bancroft/Flickr