Most of the outstanding features of this car are the gadgets. In-car technology has been taking to new heights. Bluetooth enables you to make phone calls through the sound system, your iPod has its own USB port, and an information display in the dash above your steering wheel tells you what song you’re playing. Like they say – good things come in small packages.

The first thing I did was pair my iPhone. I was reading around that people were having issues with this, but for me, it was a piece of cake! Push the windows button, then say ‘Settings,’ then ‘Pair’. How simple is that! It displays your bluetooth pin on the dash. Insert that into your phone, and Bob’s your Uncle! From there, you can upload your entire phone book onto your phone. And from then on, whenever you activate your Bluetooth, you can make a call without your hands even leaving the steering wheel. Simply push the windows button, tell the car who you want to call (“Call John Smith on mobile”), and the car will dial you through. The sound quality is generally excellent and clear. The volume for phone calls can be set up and saved, allowing the car to adjust from media player to phone call settings. But as with all things beautiful, there are well-proportioned flaws.

Considering the car puts you on loud speaker during phone calls, you have to consider the noises around you. So if you’re on the motorway, the sound may not be quite as clear for those on the other end than if you were trotting around town.

OK, so that’s the only flaw I can think of for the sound system. Proportionate, like I said – small car, tiny flaw. It just takes a little tweaking to get your volume settings how you like it. But then, that’s what you expect from an award-winning system.

One thing that I don’t completely relish about the in-car toys is the EcoDrive facility. This monitors your driving habits, and the effect that has on the environment. Hence, ECODrive. It teaches you how to drive sensibly, fuel-efficiently and how to best look after your vehicle. Once EcoDrive has been downloaded from Fiat 500, you install it onto a USB stick or iPod. Then insert that same device into the Microsoft Blue&Me slot by the hand brake, and take off. After your first five days of driving, you can then plug the device into your PC and open up EcoDrive. It will give you statistics of how you drive and check your carbon emissions. You can even visit other Eco-Friendlies in EcoVille. Very cute. At first, a fabulous opportunity to improve my driving and take pristine care of my new car. But give it a month. Just one month. Unless you are a ‘Sunday driver’ (if you know what I mean) then it gets a little tedious trying to change gears before you reach two revs and moving back down your gears when a red light is up ahead. Great in theory, not always convenient when you’re out on the road. The concept is plausible, but not necessarily sustainable throughout each journey. So when you get back to EcoVille, your never quite as pleased with yourself if you hope to be.

We added a lot of new enhancements and features along the way. We created a new Games Hub page which will also be added to the History site at a later stage. And, needless to say, made it all that much prettier.

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Apparently they are not doing early upgrading again like when we upgraded from the original iPhone to the iPhone 3G, is not going to happen.
So I called my account manager to see what can be done. After explaining my plight my manager gave me some good news.
If your a o2 Platinum account holder you can upgrade 6 months early…
Bring on the 9th July, and £87.11 for the upgrade and Bobs your uncle!

o2 have 3 different tiers:

• All customers continually spending over a minimum of £80.00 a month, receive a 6 month early upgrade
• All customers continually spending over a minimum of £50.00 a month, receive a 3 month early upgrade
• All customers continually spending a minimum of £35.00 a month, receive a 1 month early upgrade

Best you start spending a bit extra

This new little beauty has some nifty new features.
Here is 10 of the best:

1. It’s faster

Apple launched the iPhone 3G S by announcing it has a faster processor, more memory and “snappier performance”. Although the iPhone3G is no slouch, it can be a little sluggish when opening and closing applications. If Apple‘s demo videos are anything to go by, the iPhone 3G S will be a much zippier smartphone.

2. It has more memory

Apple will sell two models of the iPhone 3G S: 16GB and 32GB. There original iPhone came with 4GB, 8GB or 16GB of storage.

3. Video recording

Wow! A smartphone in 2009 that can record video? No way! Apple critics will point to the fact that the iPhone 3G can’t record video as an example of a phone that lacks some basic features, but for potential iPhone owners the addition of video recording is a real plus.

4. Improved camera

The iPhone 3G S has a 3-megapixel camera with autofocus, compared with the iPhone 3G’s 2-megapixel, non-autofocus camera. It still lacks a flash, but the increased megapixel count should slightly improve photos and tapping an area on the screen to focus on is a cool feature that should make mobile photography easier.

5. You can talk to it

The iPhone 3G S introduces what Apple calls Voice Control, a voice recognition feature that allows you to make a call and play music by speaking. Voice Control can find any entry in your contacts list, and users simply have to say a name or phone number to make a call. For music, you can ask what song is playing and hear the iPhone 3G S answer, tell it to play your favourite album, or play similar tracks to the current one.

6. It has a built-in compass

A built-in digital compass is another new feature of the iPhone 3G S. We aren’t sure exactly how often anyone would use this as a standalone app, but when combined with Google Maps, the compass will rotate maps to always match the direction you’re facing. Now that is pretty cool.

7. Internet tethering

The iPhone 3G S can now be used as a modem, connecting to a Mac or PC via USB or Bluetooth. Although AT&T in the US won’t be supporting this feature, Optus is one Australian telco that has confirmed it will be. Telstra and Vodafone are yet to announce whether they will offer tethering capability, and o2 in the UK will be charging a whopping £15 for 3GB of data.

8. Accessibility features

Apple has included a number of features that help people with disabilities use the iPhone 3G S. These include Apple’s VoiceOver function, which reads aloud what is on the screen, a zoom function that magnifies up to five times, and a white on black display option that provides increased contrast.

9. Nike+ iPod integration

Previously only available for selected iPod nano models, Apple‘s Nike + iPod is a fitness system that involves a Nike shoe communicating wirelessly with an iPod. The iPhone 3G S will be compatible with the system, which displays real time walking or running statistics.

10. New headphones

The iPhone 3G S will include Apple‘s remote headphones in the sales package. The new headphones have a multi-button remote and volume control keys, as well as a microphone to handle voice calls.

For the latest on the iPhone 3G S check out Apple iPhone.

This Botnet was first discovered in Australia, Terry Baume first observed it infecting a Netcomm NB5 modem/router. The botnet binary was further analysed by members of the website DroneBL (a real-time IP tracker that scans for botnets and vulnerable machines) which came to the conclusion that the “psyb0t” or “Network Bluepill” botnet was mostly a test run to prove the technology.

The malware contains the shellcode for over 30 different Linksys models, 10 Netgear models, and a variety of other cable and DSL modems (15 different shellcodes). A list of 6000 Usernames and 13,000 Passwords were also included, to be used for brute force entry to Telnet and SSH logins which are open to the LAN and sometimes even the public WAN side of the routers. Generally, routers do not lock a user out after a number of incorrect password attempts, making brute force attacks possible. Its a good time to change your router password to something a bit stronger and hard to guess.

This type of attack will make it harder for IT specialists to track down where the cause of the issue actually lies! 99% of the time you would assume its the PC itself, so tracking is going to be a nightmare. The only way you would guess that it could be the router is that there may be a slight network performance issue. The only way to detect it would be to monitor the traffic in and out of your router.

The bot can also disable access to the control panel of the router making the only way to clear it a Factory Reset!

What’s next, Norton for routers? Scary times ahead if its not only our PC’s that can get infected!