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Seat Belt WalletSource: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jun 2009 | 3:22 pm Palm Pixie is real, but may never materialize Lots of excitement today over a second Palm WebOS device now that the Pre has launched. The only problem is that none of this is news. We broke the story about the device, code named Pixie, on April 29. A day later we had the Pixie name and additional details.
As far as I can tell there are no additional details coming out now. So I'll supply additional information that we've gathered. Our sources in Asia tell us that Palm continues to push development of the device but is far from making a launch decision. "Palm has decided to put the Pixie on hold until they have better visibility into how its current models are selling in the market."
Our guess is that low Pre sales rates make it less likely for the Pixie to hit the market this year. Palm's WebOS is the best mobile operating system in existence, in our humble opinion. But the hardware is, at best, a B.
Source: CrunchGear | 12 Jun 2009 | 3:01 pm VC Series A Investments in Web Tech Grew Strongly In MayWe have been tracking Series A deals in Web technology since the market mayhem in October 2008. Last month, we started researching this with our new partner, ChubbyBrain, which tracks this kind of data...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm Friday marks final signoff for analog TV service (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:55 pm Friday marks final signoff for analog TV serviceTV stations across the U.S. started cutting their analog signals Friday morning, ending a 60-year run for the technology and likely stranding more than 1 million unprepared homes without TVSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:51 pm iGoogle Mobile Returns with New Site for iPhone and AndroidFor reasons we can't possibly begin to fathom, Google killed off their iPhone-optimized mobile interface for iGoogle back in January, much to the chagrin of their users. Instead of just leaving the old...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:46 pm Microsoft Launches Search Engine for China — But Don't Call It Bing - Wall Street Journal
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:46 pm Endeavour 'in really good shape to fly' - Register
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:44 pm Samsung Introduces Its First Solar Powered Mobile PhoneSamsung Electronics Co. Ltd, today announced its first solar powered mobile phone, the Crest Solar (E1107). The new handset enables its users to charge the battery anywhere the sun is shining when electricity...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:43 pm USB hard drive dock hooks up to your TV
It probably doesn’t get much simpler than this when it comes to getting video files onto your TV. Here’s a USB hard drive dock that’s got an HDMI output on the back of it and includes a remote control. Of course you’d have to plug it into your computer, dump files onto the drive, then unplug it and set it back up next to your TV, which makes for a cumbersome process. Or you could just move your TV right next to your computer, in which case you could just run cables straight from your computer to your TV. Whatever the case, the dock costs $79, which seems pricey. If you’re still interested, it’ll play back up to 1080i resolution files in the following formats: MPEG-1/2/4, DivX, XviD, and VOB. The back of the dock features HDMI, component, and composite outputs and the unit accepts 3.5- and 2.5-inch SATA hard drives, along with SD cards.
SATA HDD Multimedia Dock II (HDMI) [Brando]
Source: CrunchGear | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:40 pm IRS moves to collect taxes on your work-provided cellphone
Another potshot aimed at the working man, friends. The IRS is looking to collecting more taxes on your work-provided cellphone, something the wireless industry—think CTIA, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, etc.—will fight tooth and nail. The industry thinks that if companies and/or employees have to pay more for their phones, they may cancel the service altogether. But let’s go into a little detail first, figure out what’s going on. The IRS, naturally, wants to collect more tax revenue. There’s a law on the books, from 1989, that says you’re supposed to pay income tax on any personal minutes you use on a work-provided cellphone. That is, if you work for Big Company, and Big Company gives you a BlackBerry to use during the day for your work but you also use said BlackBerry to call your wife to ask what type of cereal the kids want from the store—Cinnamon Toast Crunch, please—those minutes are, technically, taxable income. Now, the idea that businesses and employees should keep a detailed log of the minutes they use, tallying work-related minutes versus personal-related minutes, is patently absurd; it’s entirely too much of an effort. But the IRS knows this, too. So, if you cannot be expected to keep a log of your work versus personal minutes used, and thus how much taxable income to pay, what happens? The IRS could set a limit on untaxed personal minutes; use more minutes, and those minutes are taxed (but you’d someone have to keep track of minutes used). The IRS could also use statistics to figure out, on average, how many personal, taxable minutes are used on work-provided cellphones, then tax you from there. Or, simply, the IRS could “waive tax liability” if employees show they use their work-provided cellphones for personal use during business hours. It’s all terribly confusing, yes. In any event, should you find yourself in the 28% income tax bracket (which is more than Cristiano Ronaldo will pay in Spain now, mind you), and your company pays $1,500 per year on cellphone service, you could find yourself owing the tax man an additional $105 per year. Is that a huge deal? No, probably not, but it’s still pretty annoying, I’ll grant that. And here’s where the wireless industry gets mad. Their assumption is that, if companies and employees now have to keep track of minutes, companies may decide it’s not even worth giving employees a cellphone. They may calculate that, the amount of resources needed to keep tabs on everyone’s minutes outweighs the benefits of giving employees cellphones in the first place. And then they’d cancel their cellphone contracts! My guess is that this won’t be too popular with the working man, no sir. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Source: Gizmodo | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:40 pm IRS proposes taxing workers for company-issued cell phonesAccording to The Wall Street Journal the use of company-issued mobile phones could trigger new federal income taxes on millions of Americans as a "fringe benefit." The Internal Revenue Service proposed...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:38 pm Safari 4 More Popular Among Window Users Than Mac [Digital Daily]
More than six million downloads by Windows users? That means Safari 4, at least at the outset, is more popular on Windows than Mac. Now the former’s installed base is signifigantly larger, I know. But still … Clearly Apple’s 2007 decision to suggest Safari to Windows users via the iTunes software update has done great things to boos usage on that platform. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs said when Safari for Windows was first announced:
And successfully, too. Source: All Things Digital | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:35 pm The only thing missing from WWDCTUAW's Chris Rawson takes apart PC World's reaching list of things missing from WWDC. TUAW concludes that nothing was missing, because the laptops getting spec bumps took him completely by surprise. (SD card reader! I know!) On this point, I have only one thing to say: where is my god-damned displayport 30" cinema display? Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:34 pm Where does Palm go from here? - FierceWireless
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 12 Jun 2009 | 2:26 pm EU: browser-free Windows gives no real choice
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 Environmental Leader | Cisco, EMC Team with MIT to Launch $100M Green Data Center Reuters By GreenerComputing Staff - GreenerComputing Staff The city of Holyoke, with a ready source of cheap, relatively clean hydroelectic power, will host a new, energy efficient data center that will bring innovation and jobs to the city. Video: Governor Patrick Holyoke High-Performance Computing as the Future of Holyoke's E-conomy ... |
Opera may be reinventing the web next week, but in the meantime the browser wars continue to rage on. Apple has come out with a news release claiming its latest browser, Safari 4, has topped 11 million downloads in the first three days of its release. Surprisingly, it also claims over half of those (or 6 million to be specific) were the Windows version of the program.
Apple continues to tout the speed of its browser, claiming that it loads HTML pages 3 times faster than both Firefox 3 and IE8, and that the new Nitro JavaScript engine executes JavaScript nearly 8 times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Mozilla’s latest browser version. On a related note, Apple also says in the upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard release, Safari will run as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 %.
As Erick has stated before, the discussion regarding which company now markets the fastest browser - I’m sticking to Google Chrome - is irrelevant as long as all of them speed up.
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 MiamiHerald.com | Scribd To Offer Simon & Schuster Books Online ChannelWeb Stephen King, Simon & Schuster and a Bay Area e-book reader Website may seem like strange bedfellows, but it looks like all three are planning to get cozy. Anyone care to publish some textbooks on Scribd? S&S to Offer Almost 5000 Titles for Sale on Scribd.com |
 Techtree.com | Kindle DX Gets Listed, Ripped Apart Techtree.com Last month, Amazon launched new bigger Kindle version dubbed Kindle DX that is meant for reading textbooks, magazines and newspapers. Kindle DX Teardown Reveals Inner Beauty Kindle DX Or The Kindle 2? Is Bigger Always Better? |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We’ve heard the phrase ‘reinventing the web’ too many times already, so we’re wary of Opera’s claims, but this made us curious anyhow. The browser maker has just unveiled Opera 10 in beta, so it could be taking the wraps off the product and taking it public rather quickly. Or it could be something entirely different.
Opera users don’t seem to know what’s going on either.
We’ve asked the company for clarity, although we don’t expect a clarifying response at all. We’ll just have to wait until June 16th; everyone can stop doing whatever it is they are doing on the current Web for now until Opera is ready with the new version. 
In the meantime, anyone care to venture a guess?
And no, it’s likely not the Internet on a stick.
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We’ve been screaming from a soapbox for months about today. We’ve gave you a series of tips and tricks, along with answering all the frequently asked questions about DTV. Still, there are millions of homes not ready for the switch to digital according to a recent survey. But what are you gonna do?
There will always be procrastinators. Perhaps some thought that Obama was going to save their antiquated analog signals for a second time. Who knows. But today is June 12, 2009 and the switch to digital should be done within a few hours. Remember to rescan your DTV tuner as some stations are switching throughout the day for the first time.
President Barack Obama gets pretty high marks from the tech set for his embrace of all things Webby. Except when they’re giving him grief: After overhauling the official White House Web site to make it, you know, interactive and stuff, the administration caught flak from privacy advocates because of the way Google’s YouTube used tracking cookies on the site.
But after making an initial concession earlier this year, Google (GOOG) and the White House are going further. The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains: “Ordinarily, YouTube maintains a record of every YouTube video you’ve ever viewed, associated with your YouTube account, through use of the YouTube cookie. Now, they’ve agreed to exempt videos embedded on Whitehouse.gov from this logging.”
Will that be good enough to satisfy hard-to-please critics like the EFF? Amazingly, it does! Though of course, they’d like to see more. Here’s Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s legal director:
This is a good step and we commend YouTube and the Government for taking it. It shows that they recognize that tracking the government videos that Americans view is creepy and wrong. It also shows that Google/YouTube technologists can build and offer clever, useful privacy-protective modifications to their standard software.
Now we’d like to see them turn that cleverness to other places, not just the White House. Google/YouTube should offer this same “tracking-free” viewing to others. Human rights videos, politically sensitive videos, or even ordinary videos where viewers may want privacy should all be available without tracking…
In addition, the government should adopt “tracking-free” videos across the board for all government websites. Viewers of videos from the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, your member of Congress and other governmental entities deserve the same privacy protection that viewers of the President’s speeches.
The IRS has videos? Who knew? In the meantime, feel free to watch clips like this one, of Obama’s April victory over the UConn women’s basketball team in a game of “P-I-G,” without worrying that the government is watching you watch.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Startup executives and employees haven’t had it easy cashing out of their private company stock since the IPO and M&A markets, which typically provide “liquidity” and a route to riches, have been relatively moribund in recent years. Spotting an opportunity, several companies have sprung up in recent months to try and provide startups with new avenues to liquidity.
Next week, another of these companies, SharesPost, plans to announce their new service, say people briefed on the matter. The Los Angeles-area based company, headed by CEO Greg Brogger, will unveil an online platform where people can list their private company shares for sale and get bids for the stock.
SharesPost is positioned as a kind of Craigslist for private company stock, connecting sellers and buyers in an online classified ads-like model, say people briefed on the matter.
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It seems that even in this downturn, there is still room for tech IPOs, at least in Japan. Cookpad [JP], the nation’s biggest site for sharing recipes, today announced it will be listed in the “Mothers” section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange on July 17.
Cookpad was launched as early as 1997 by the Tokyo-based company of the same name. The Japanese-only site now offers nearly 560,000 different recipes (submitted by users) and saw a whopping 351 million page views last month, generated by 6.8 million unique visitors. By way of comparison, one of America’s leading recipe sites, Allrecipes.com, claims it has almost double that number, but Google Trends shows there isn’t too much of difference.
Targeting mostly Japanese women in their 20s and 30s, Cookpad makes a decent amount of money. The site expects $18.5 million in revenues and $3.6 million net profit for the current fiscal year (that ends April 2010). Basic membership is free, but users can opt-in for a premium version ($3 monthly) to get access to more functions. Additional money comes in via display ads.
More information (in English) about the site can be found here.
The “Mothers” section for high-growth startup companies is the same in which Japanese site GREE, a mobile-only social gaming service that went IPO in December last year, achieved a market cap of $1.3 billion on its first day. GREE and Cookpad going IPO is good news for the Japanese web industry, which targets the third biggest Internet population in the world.
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What a brilliant move.
The European Commission claims that Microsoft’s practice of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows violates European competition laws, so the company strips IE out of European versions of Windows 7. Now the Commission can’t argue that Microsoft’s behavior distorts fair competition in the browser market because, well, there’s no browser.
And if there’s no browser, there’s no need for the “must carry” provision the EC is mulling, which would require Microsoft (MSFT) to ship Windows 7 with a choice of browsers, rather than with IE alone.
And if there’s no “must carry” provision, Microsoft’s rivals in the browser market must continue to bear the costs of their own advertising and distribution (I’m talking to you, Opera). They can’t piggyback on Windows as the provision would have allowed.
And if there are no browsers whatsoever bundled with Windows 7, the European Commission’s constituents are going to be very unhappy. Because they’ll be paying full price for a defeatured version of Windows 7. Remember how well Vista N went over?
And make no mistake, they will be buying Windows. And in the end, that’s what’s important, right? A Windows user browsing the Web with Opera or Firefox is still a Windows user. And hey, they may soon be a Bing user as well.
Well played, Microsoft.
No wonder the EC is already wrinkling its nose at the move. “The Commission will shortly decide in the pending browser tying antitrust case whether or not Microsoft’s conduct from 1996 to date has been abusive and, if so, what remedy would be necessary to create genuine consumer choice and address the anticompetitive effects of Microsoft’s longstanding conduct,” the EC said in a statement issued late Thursday. “In terms of potential remedies if the Commission were to find that Microsoft had committed an abuse, the Commission has suggested that consumers should be offered a choice of browser, not that Windows should be supplied without a browser at all….As for retail sales, which amount to less than 5 percent of total sales, the Commission had suggested to Microsoft that consumers be provided with a choice of web browsers. Instead Microsoft has apparently decided to supply retail consumers with a version of Windows without a web browser at all. Rather than more choice, Microsoft seems to have chosen to provide less.”
Perhaps. But Microsoft’s obligation isn’t to provide more choice. It’s to refrain from restricting it, which is exactly what it’s doing here. Sadly for Microsoft, it’s likely too little, too late. The tone of the EC’s response and its mention of “Microsoft’s longstanding conduct” clearly suggest that the agency continues to mull corrective action. So in the the end this may be all for naught.
Paris-based MyFab has just raised €5 million ($7 million) in a second round, which was led by previous investor Alven Capital and joined by BV Capital. The total amount invested in the company is now €7 million ($8.9 million). MyFab - which is currently available only in French and German - is an interesting e-commerce play in that its mission consists of cutting out all middlemen in the process of consumers buying furniture.
According to the company big furniture brands - particularly those wearing the 'design' hat - often outsource the whole manufacturing process of sofas, lamps, etc. to factories in foreign countries and charge ridiculous prices for the end-product compared to the total cost of production.
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Mobile, Computers, Software / Applications
Without even trying to get all speculative on the reasoning behind this release, I cannot help but wonder what this really says for Android and its future. Evernote has just released a version of their app for the Palm Pre. Which is currently available as a free download from the Palm App Catalog.
This, of course, should come as good news for Evernote users who are using a Palm Pre, however it seems a little telling that an app has not only been released, but has been released so quickly. Take the fact that the Palm Pre has been available for just a very short time and Android on the other hand has been available for quite a bit longer. Could this be telling us something about how the success of the Palm Pre will play out as opposed to Android? After all, I think it is safe to say that thanks to the current and previous success of the iPhone thanks to the App Store, a fair amount of the success of the Palm Pre and Android are going to come down to how much support they are receiving from the developer community.
Getting back to Evernote for the Palm Pre, similar to the mobile clients for the iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile you can create new notes, edit existing notes, take a photo and save it as a note, search your notes as well as browse your current notes as thumbnails. The Evernote app for the Palm Pre is available as a free download. As for the Evernote service itself, that can either be found in the form of a free or paid service depending on your needs.
Read [Evernote] Via [jkOnTheRun]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
At the end of last year, we talked about and gave away some beta invites for newcomer WizeHive, a group messaging and task management app that rivals the likes of Yammer, Present.ly, Producteev and to some degree even more full-fledged collaboration services like BaseCamp and Central Desktop.
Since then, founders Mike Carson and Michael Levinson - the latter is also founder of DreamIt Ventures - have been bootstrapping their way to a pretty powerful business tool boasting a lot of useful features.
One recently added feature is push/pull integration with Twitter, which enables users to perform certain actions like creating tasks and notes from individual Twitter accounts, with the additional ability to retrieve and modify certain information from Twitter. Also, WizeHive now comes with what Levinson refers to as “3D task management”, or the ability to pick which data to display in rows, columns and which data you want color coded at intersecting cells, creating a nice visual overview of your current ‘workspace’. You can get an overview of all new features in separate demo videos on Levinson’s Vimeo channel.
The core task management functionality has also been revamped and now sports a nifty AJAX front-end that allows people to easily drag and drop tasks, assign tasks to other people, etc. Last but not least, WizeHive now also comes with an Adobe AIR-powered desktop client that features a tab with Twitter-style activity feeds as well as a list of tasks much like you would if you were using the web app.
WizeHive, which is still in beta mode, now boasts about 1000 active users who have entered or e-mailed in over 26000 notes and over 6700 tasks. When it’s finally ready for the public, WizeHive will have to compete for attention with a boatload of online collaboration and task management application providers, but if it ultimately turns out it can’t, it most certainly won’t be because the product doesn’t stack up to the rest.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fujifilm yesterday announced [JP] the FinePix Z300 for the Japanese market, a digital camera that lets users snap pictures by touching the target object on the LCD screen on its backside. The Z300 can focus the shot by itself so that even beginners can make decent photos.
For users who don’t like the concept of touching a screen (3 inches) to make a picture, the Z300 still offers the good old shutter button. The camera also features 10MP, 5x optical zoom, 100 to 1600 ISO speed, the usual crappy internal memory (31MB), SD/SDHC card support, video recording at 30fps and a USB port.
The Z300 will hit Japanese stores on June 20 for $400 (in pink, white, purple and black). Fujifilm hasn’t announced their plans for overseas markets yet.
Lots of excitement today over a second Palm WebOS device now that the Pre has launched. The only problem is that none of this is news. We broke the story about the device, code named Pixie, on April 29. A day later we had the Pixie name and additional details.
As far as I can tell there are no additional details coming out now. So I’ll supply additional information that we’ve gathered. Our sources in Asia tell us that Palm continues to push development of the device but is far from making a launch decision. “Palm has decided to put the Pixie on hold until they have better visibility into how its current models are selling in the market.”
Our guess is that low Pre sales rates make it less likely for the Pixie to hit the market this year. Palm’s WebOS is the best mobile operating system in existence, in our humble opinion. But the hardware is, at best, a B.
We’ve also heard from multiple sources that Palm initially ordered 500,000 units of the Palm Pre from Foxconn for delivery by the end of May. Instead, they got 150,000 units in June. The reason? “the device’s complicated mechanical design caused low yield rates.” The result was a delayed launch and poor supply.
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Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Twitter user who has effectively spammed himself senseless reaches out to us for help. And we’re going to oblige. The only trouble is, he’s making yet another error in judgment, because my guess is this is going to make things worse.
Ryan Barr started a petition on Twitter to ask AT&T to “offer reasonable iPhone 3GS upgrade prices.” And even though it’s unlikely that AT&T cares even a little bit about this or any other petition, it’s getting some traction. Nearly 10,000 people have “signed” it.
The problem is that every time someone signs the petition it autotweets the message “Petition: AT&T to offer reasonable iPhone 3GS upgrade prices http://twitition.com/f96aq @ryanbarr,” which sends a message back to Barr and absolutely pollutes the reply stream (the only really useful way to interact with Twitter).
Anyway, here’s Barr’s message. I just signed the petition myself and I’m guessing a lot of you will, too. But don’t worry Ryan. It’ll slow down eventually, probably.
Dear TechCrunch,
My name is Ryan Barr, known on Twitter as @ryanbarr . If you may have noticed, I started a petition (or twitition) found here: http://twitition.com/f96aq .
I want out.
When I first started the petition, it was due to a rant I was having about the price of the phone. It didn’t take long for me to truly not care about the prices as much as I had. And it didn’t take much longer for the petition I started to go out of control.
At the time of this e-mail the petition just passed 9200 signatures. For each signature, a message is tweeted as follows:
“Petition: AT&T to offer reasonable iPhone 3GS upgrade prices http://twitition.com/f96aq @ryanbarr”
That’s right, 9200 @ryanbarr’s over the span of two (going on three) days. This does not include the unnecessary retweets people also make. I can no longer stand not being able to see real replies in my timeline. I have AT&T employees following me and saying stuff behind my back when I was just ranting on a site that seemed to have little activity.
I completely, COMPLETELY regret pressing the submit button. As the petition nears the 10000 mark I fear even more. As at that mark, TweetMeme will show me as a TM_10000 (@http://twitter.com/TM_10000) … the first, ever.
TechCrunch — you have the power to make businesses grow. You have the power to make or break the reputation of a new device. Please, help me find a way out of this petition. The attention I am receiving is unwanted — I just want to be able to come clear to all the signers and say, “I don’t want in this anymore. I didn’t mean for it to last this long.”
Thanks for anything and for the great reads over the longhaul.
Best Regards,
Ryan Barr
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The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has learned. That move reverses a years-long trend of blocking the web 2.0 locales on military networks.
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A small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.
Since its announcement yesterday, there’s been a lot of excited discussion of the feature, but in a dashes.com exclusive I can exclusively report this exclusive look at the future of the feature.
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“Boring! Can we fast-forward?” my daughter asks as Joan Baez warbles “Joe Hill” at Woodstock. We are “sharing” the newly released 40th Anniversary DVD of the Woodstock documentary, but she is doing here what she also does when we run my iPod through the car stereo.
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For most people (including me), privacy policies fall into the same category as “terms of service” documents — they contain important information, but are usually so long and impenetrably written that they’re not worth the effort of reading. AT&T says it’s trying to take a different approach with a draft privacy policy that it published this morning, one that’s actually comprehensible to your average reader.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Apple introduced its latest iPhone, the 3GS yesterday. The new phone will be priced at $199 for 16 GB and $299 for 32 GB (with a new, two year AT&T contract), and its most visible new feature is that its new, 3.0-megapixel camera can focus and take video, a first for the iPhone.
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Well, this is a bummer. Flowgram, a promising startup that launched last July, is a goner.
The service let users create screencasts with live websites, and the early beta users really liked it:
What you see above is not a video or a slide show, it is a Flowgram. If you click on it, you will be taken to a full-screen player with what appears to be a screencast with a voiceover. Except that you can control the pages by scrolling up and down, watching any videos that might be on the page, or clicking on the live links (which takes you out of the Flowgram to that Website, but if you hit the back button it picks up where it left off). You can also add comments and share the Flowgram via a widget like the one above, which is muted and requires you to click through for the full experience.
But this evening founder Abhay Parekh sent an email out to users letting them know that the service would be closed by the end of June (in fact it’s dead now):
Dear Flowgram user:
Today is a sad day for us. We have decided to terminate the Flowgram service as of the end of the month (June 30th, 2009). The service received excellent reviews and had an enthusiastic core user base. However, we were not able to demonstrate (especially in these economic times) that Flowgrams would ever be prevalent enough for us to adequately monetize the business, either though ads or subscriptions. This is obviously very disappointing, but building the Flowgram platform was a lot of fun, and it was wonderful to see how many of you used our tool to express yourselves in a deep and meaningful way.
Although you won’t be able to play your Flowgrams after the end of the month, you can export them to video by clicking “share” from the website or “more sharing options” from the Flowgram player and scrolling down to the export to video section. It is very important, if you wish to keep your content, that you export to video and download the video by the end of the month. Please let us know at support@flowgram.com if you have any difficulties doing this.
Again, I would like to thank you for your support, for your Flowgrams and for your good wishes.
Best Regards
Abhay Parekh (Founder) and the rest of the Flowgram Team
Flowgram enters the DeadPool after raising $1.3 million from prominent angel investors Reid Hoffman, Josh Kopelman, Caterina Fake, Stewart Butterfield, Bud Colligan, Kevin Lynch, Joi Ito and Rajeev Motwani. Just goes to show that even the smartest and richest people in Silicon Valley can still make a whopper of a bad investment decision.
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Super-umbrella contracts to avoid inadvertent umbrella-related homicide
Interview: Jack Conte, Internet musician
Refreshment, thy name is Sippin’ Seat
DIY spy van/mobile office
Samsung goes official on the WB1000/TL320 digicam
So here's the question: would the average punter off the streets in the UK who stumbled across a copy of Mobipocket's "Edge" think, "Oh look, that games magazine old company that used to also publish software in the 1980s has done a new game"? I'm pretty sure the answer is no. Our household's a good test case: I'm not much of a gamer, but I know about Edge. My wife, on the other hand, is a games professional who played Quake for England on the national team. Neither of us have any trouble distinguishing Mobipocket's "Edge" from "Edge," the magazine ancient software company.
Edge Magazine The trademark holder for Edge has a long and shameful history of threatening companies over its trademark, treating the word "Edge" as its property. Finally, someone is standing up for the public's right to have products and services called "Edge" in the marketplace.
Update: With apologies to Edge Magazine for confusing them with the trademark holder!
Edge of madness: the copyfight between Mobigame and Tim LangdellA short list of the companies that have apparently settled with Langdell and licensed the name or otherwise stepped out of his way include UK magazine Edge, Namco -- whose Soul Edge game would be released in the west as Soul Blade, 1997 Anthony Hopkins movie The Edge, Malibu comics character Edge and any Marvel comic with the word in the title... the list goes on, but out of all the heavy hitters that have conceded, Langdell has finally met his angriest and noisiest match in the one place he probably least expected it: the indie game community.
Langdell has, of course, maintained his right to the mark, and has further claimed that Mobigame has undertaken what amounts to a PR war against him, but since that late May day, the facts have been piling up against him. Chief, in my mind, is the allegation by Mobigame that after informing Langdell that they'd be happy to withdraw any claims and change the name of their game to Edgy, Langdell immediately filed a new trademark on exactly that name (and the name does appear in the trademark database, filed some days before the App Store removal).
Discuss this on Offworld
Source: Boing Boing | 12 Jun 2009 | 6:17 am
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures--even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks--and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.Wall Street's Toxic Message (via Memex 1.1)The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?
Many in the developing world still smart from the hectoring they received for so many years: they should adopt American institutions, follow our policies, engage in deregulation, open up their markets to American banks so they could learn "good" banking practices, and (not coincidentally) sell their firms and banks to Americans, especially at fire-sale prices during crises. Yes, Washington said, it will be painful, but in the end you will be better for it. America sent its Treasury secretaries (from both parties) around the planet to spread the word. In the eyes of many throughout the developing world, the revolving door, which allows American financial leaders to move seamlessly from Wall Street to Washington and back to Wall Street, gave them even more credibility; these men seemed to combine the power of money and the power of politics. American financial leaders were correct in believing that what was good for America or the world was good for financial markets, but they were incorrect in thinking the converse, that what was good for Wall Street was good for America and the world.
io9's roundup of "7 Great Sci-Fi Moments From The Muppet Show" includes some absolute gems, including Alan Arkin, Jeckell-and-Hyded into monster-form, performing a stunning rendition of "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah."
7 Great Sci-Fi Moments From The Muppet Show
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c |
| End Times | |
| thedailyshow.com | |
The Daily Show's segment on the decline of the New York Times ("reporting the news, making stuff up, getting us into war") is fantastic - and reaches its peak when Jason Jones asks an editor to describe the appeal of "aged news," and when the editor asks him to explain, he challenges the editor to find a single thing in the paper that happened that day.
June 10, 2009: End Times
Source: Boing Boing | 12 Jun 2009 | 5:22 am
The Chinese government has mandated that all PCs sold in the country must soon include a censorship program called Green Dam. This software monitors web sites visited and other activity on the computer and blocks adult content as well as politically sensitive material. We examined the Green Dam software and found that it contains serious security vulnerabilities due to programming errors. Once Green Dam is installed, any web site the user visits can exploit these problems to take control of the computer. This could allow malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet. In addition, we found vulnerabilities in the way Green Dam processes blacklist updates that could allow the software makers or others to install malicious code during the update process. We found these problems with less than 12 hours of testing, and we believe they may be only the tip of the iceberg. Green Dam makes frequent use of unsafe and outdated programming practices that likely introduce numerous other vulnerabilities. Correcting these problems will require extensive changes to the software and careful retesting. In the meantime, we recommend that users protect themselves by uninstalling Green Dam immediately.Analysis of the Green Dam Censorware System
Freedom to Tinker: China's New Mandatory Censorware Creates Big Security Flaws (Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)
It reminds me of the scene in Stephenson's Diamond Age in which a neo-Victorian recounts, "Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none."
"I'm not going to make excuses," he replied evenly. "Let me ask you a question: Is there a difference between politicians and anybody else? Or is it that the lives of politicians are so very public?"Lunch in the Park with Eliot (via Kottke)"There is a difference, Mr. Spitzer. You were elected to a position of public trust."
"That's right," he conceded. "It's why I resigned without delay. Some said I could try to ride it out. But I didn't see it that way. What I did was heinous and wrong..."
"You knew the risks. Either you felt you were above the law or you had some kind of death wish."
His response was that neither was the case. "It's a story that has been repeated since our earliest days as a species. It's both obvious and not susceptible to an answer," he insisted. "Nonetheless, we are led down a certain path. It wasn't hubris or a death wish--but frailty, temptation, and common miscalculation."
Teasmade (via Making Light)
: Size seems to matter to the folks at Amazon. While the Kindle 2 has a 6-inch (measured diagonally) e-ink screen — roughly the area of a mass-market paperback book — the DX's 9.7-inch screen resembles a page from a typical hardback. Put another way, the DX flaunts 2.5 times more display space. More text on a page means more lines and, if you prefer, a bigger font, without having to turn the page as often. What does that mean for you? It's easier to read using the DX.
By elegantly super-sizing the Kindle — and ramping up its ability to read files — Amazon has improved the best all-around e-reader available. But the hefty price tag doesn't fit Jeff Bezo's stated philosophy of getting the best value for his customers.
WIRED Big-screen device that's even more readable than the original Kindle. PDF support is a welcome addition.
TIRED High cost of admission. Pivot mode has hair trigger. Southpaws will find the reader cumbersome.
$490, amazon.com
Read our full Amazon.com Kindle DX review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Shaped like a small bar of shower soap, the dense, ebony Pre matches many (if not all) of the features of its chief competitor, the iPhone. But in one key aspect, the Pre does the iPhone one better. While a lot of the Pre's features — a bright 3.1-inch touchscreen manipulated by taps, swipes and pinches; apps sold by third parties in an open online bazaar; integration of e-mail, contacts and calendar — are now standard in 3G smartphones, Palm also lets users keep multiple applications running simultaneously.
Its long-term prospects, though, hinge on whether or not all those third-party apps will show up, whether Sprint can satisfy users, and whether Apple has something up its sleeve that counters the Palm's gambits. Also, of course, the Pre has to prove stable and reliable. (Our test unit occasionally suffered opening-day jitters, including a crash that was fixed only by taking out the removable battery.)
WIRED Great look and superb feel. Well-conceived OS with multitasking and instant notification. Physical keyboard. Utilizes iTunes to load and refresh content.
TIRED Multitasking puts a big suck on the battery. Sprint exclusivity will be annoying to Palm-philes on a contract with AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. Keyboard is puny. If Apple blocks the handset's access to iTunes, Pre users are hosed.
$200 (with two year contract), palm.com
Read our full Palm Pre review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Demonstrating that it's serious about making a run at the top-end offerings from Canon and Nikon, the K-7 bows with a spankin' new 14.6 megapixel, 28.1mm (diagonal) CMOS image sensor and an updated Prime II processor. This enables HD-video capture, built-in high dynamic range shooting, a 77-segment metering system, pre- and post-production filtering and distortion correction, all in a form factor more than 10 percent smaller (and actually easier to handle) than its predecessor, the K20D.
By and large, it's a super quick focusing compact image-maker — once you learn how the menu system works. But it's just a step or two behind Nikon and Canon in ease of use. In spite of that, Pentax has nearly hit a home run with the K-7. It's svelte, sturdy, fairly easy to operate, has a great range of available lenses and a feature set that's unmatched at this price. Think of it as a solid double off the wall, with an RBI.
WIRED Speedy 5.2 frames per second. Super-sturdy construction. Lots of pro features at a prosumer price. Improved battery life and 100 percent field-of-view viewfinder. Faster, more robust processor. Live View with contrast focus and face detection. Shoots 5.2 frames-per-second with shutter speed up to 1/8000. The 77-segment metering system and 11-point AF system are quick and spot on. Internal mechanical shake reduction.
TIRED User interface needs to be simpler and more unified.
$1,300 (body only), pentax.com
Read our full Pentax K-7 DSLR review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: The A600's 21.5-inch screen (1920 x 1080 pixels) is big and dazzlingly bright — so much so that Lenovo includes an automatic screen-dimming system designed to prevent eyestrain. Inside its bowels, this 25-pounder offers substantial specs: 2.13-GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and a terabyte hard drive. The ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics card may be getting a little long in the tooth, but it's powerful enough to make the A600 more than acceptable to play all but the very latest gaming titles.
That's a lot of stuff for the price — $1,150 — and stripped-down versions of the IdeaCentre run considerably less. If you don't need the power but dig the design and screen size, the budget rendition might be an even better bet.
WIRED Very small footprint. Single-cable design is a blessing for technophobes. Swivel base makes adjustments to viewing angle easy. Six USB ports and 802.11n Wi-Fi, plus FireWire, SD and coaxial connectors.
TIRED Keyboard and mouse frequently fall asleep; difficult to awaken. Remote control overly complex and rather homely. Included games feel like an engineer on Quaaludes designed them.
$1,150 (as tested), lenovo.com
Read our full Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Its glossy black finish and polished Darth Vader design makes Samsung's newest Blu-ray box, the BD-P4600, stand out from every other player on the market. Well, it actually doesn't stand anywhere at all -- it comes with the metal brackets to mount it on a wall or plant it on a desktop pedestal. And like Lord Vader, this model packs some serious force with its built-in streaming for Pandora music and Netflix.
For $100 less, you could pick up Samsung's BD-P3600 a player that has all the same features as this model but comes in a non-wall-mountable chassis. But really, would you want to watch The Empire Strikes Back on a Blu-ray player that didn't look like it was made in a dark corner of Coruscant?
WIRED High-end, spacey designed Blu-ray player is loaded with features include ability to wall mount, loads Blu-ray discs exceptional fast and offers exceptional playback.
TIRED Complicated initial setup for its feature set. Cramped underside port-connection compartment. Competitively over priced for what it delivers.
$500, samsung.com
Read our full Samsung BD-P4600 review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Let's cut to the chase and hit you with the sell: The MSI X340 is a MacBook Air at half the price. Interested? Read on.
For starters, the X340 (aka the X Slim) is considerably better muscled than your typical netbook, featuring a glossy 13.4-inch (1366 x 768 pixels) screen, 320-GB hard drive and 2 GB of RAM. Like Apple's ultralight, it's incredibly thin — about 0.8 inches at its thickest — and it actually weighs slightly less than the Air, just 2.9 pounds.
Before you start salivating over the prospects of a half-price Air, note that Apple's laptop does trump the X340 in a few significant ways. The Air includes Nvidia graphics, while the X340 is stuck with Intel's integrated chipset.
The screens are night and day: The Air is renowned for having one of the brightest LCDs available, while the X340 is merely average in this department.
WIRED Gorgeous design; slap an Apple sticker over the MSI logo and no one will ever know. Performance bests most netbooks, though it's hardly top-notch. Surprisingly good graphics and responsiveness. Includes the usual goodies: 1.3-MP webcam, Bluetooth, 802.11n.
TIRED Flaky touchpad. Disappointing battery life.
$900 (as tested), us.msi.com
Read our full MSI X340 review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: The first day we took the car for a spin we kept the front-mounted 5.9-liter 470 BHP vehicle on a strict diet of city driving: no freeways, no tightly coiled back roads. Trudging through heavy traffic almost felt sadistic — kind of like taking a thoroughbred racehorse and giving it polio. But after exiting the city limits and tearing down a stretch of asphalt connecting San Francisco with Napa Valley, the DB9 snapped up, greedily devouring 90-degree curves with just a hint of oversteer.
WIRED Fast like a sports car, more refined than a quart of 40-weight. Gorgeous; induces whiplash in head-turning bystanders. Zippy acceleration for a GT — you can't front on a 4.6-second zero-to-60 time ... unless you're armed with a Ferrari or a Bentley.
TIRED Hood-release switch located in impossibly hard to find/reach nook (as if an Aston owner would ever do that). iPod access tres difficult to set up. Chugs gas like an ASU freshman rips beer-bong hits. Back seat harder to get into than MIT.
$209,000 as tested, astonmartin.com
Read our full Aston Martin DB9 review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: If you don't mind looking like an extra in a 1-800-Dentist commercial and have no reservations about looking like a crazy person yammering to yourself, the Plantronics Voyager Pro may be the perfect Bluetooth headset for you.
This headset is big, bulky and (surprise, surprise) silly looking. The 3-inch boom extending out toward your mouth is the main culprit of these crimes against style. But despite being tacky, the Voyager Pro delivers strong performance. It's easy to use, withstands drops, bumps and haphazardly tossed laptops, has decent battery life and pairs effortlessly with a range of smartphones, including the iPhone.
WIRED Easy to use. Super sound quality. Stays attached to your ear. You will look like a telephone operator from the '50s.
TIRED You will look like a telephone operator from the '50s.
$100, plantronics.com
Read our full Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth Headset review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: After a few grim years ceded to the iMac, PC-based all-in-one desktops are making an LL Cool J-esque comeback. Their next move: Make the switch from semi-luxe gear designed for highly aesthetic environments to the megacheap world that the netbook has built.
Specs look exceedingly promising at first: 250 GB of hard drive space, 2 GB of RAM, integrated Wi-Fi, DVD burner, an SD card slot and a very bright 19-inch touchscreen display. If nothing else, it's one of the best-looking touchscreens (non-capacitive; a stylus works better than your finger) we've seen at this screen size.
But the Achilles' heel of the Wind Top is its baffling choice of an Atom 330 processor to power these guts. Although the dual-core 330 is known as the "fast" version of the Atom (it draws 8 watts instead of the 2.5 watts used by the netbook standard Atom N270 and has double the L2 cache), it's still woefully inadequate for a computer this ambitious.
WIRED Amazingly affordable and loaded to the gills. Touchscreen makes this a perfect kiddie computer. Slim profile lets it fit just about anywhere. Cuter than a box of puppies.
TIRED Performance problems dog the user at every turn. Flashing blue hard-drive activity light is front and center, terribly distracting and impossible to cover up. Bundled keyboard and mouse are beyond cheap. Webcam aim can't be adjusted.
$590 (as tested), us.msi.com
Read our full MSI Wind Top AE1900 review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: The new Chrome Soyuz is an ambitious (if slightly crazed) reimagining of the urban commuter backpack. It's a weird hybrid of a river-rafting drybag and laptop case, all contained within a stylish wedge of black and red nylon.
It sits comfortably behind your back, letting you weave through traffic on your fixie without fear of snagging on the projecting mirrors of double-parked delivery trucks. It can ride between your knees on a crowded train. And it tucks neatly below an airplane seat, leaving just enough space on either side to squeeze in your feet so you can stretch your legs.
WIRED Wedge design keeps load balanced, trim and compact. Expandable waterproof compartment shrinks down to nothing when empty. Heavy-duty 1,000-denier cordura nylon withstands abuse. Main compartments are completely waterproof. Heavy-duty metal strap locks make adjustment easy. Glorious enameled metal "Chrome" logo.
TIRED Narrow openings + deep compartments = where the hell did my keys go? Not quite big enough to contain a six-pack (unless you put the bottles in one by one). Padding traps heat, steaming your back on long rides. No hip belt. Pricier than a metric ton of pig iron.
$180, chromebags.com
Read our full Chrome Soyuz Backpack review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: The pristine fidelity these headphones deliver is the result of a dual-armature layout, which bathes your tympanic membranes in accurate audio reproduction. The earpiece's dual drivers have the added benefit of propping up the typically flaccid base that seems to plague many other in-ear monitors.
The only major downside is that great sound comes at a considerable price — $230 to be precise. For most people, that's likely to be as much (or more) than you spent on your MP3 player. But as my neglected Audio Technicas can attest, in this case, you undoubtedly get what you pay for.
WIRED Exquisite sound reproduction in an insanely small package. Handy in-flight attenuator saves you from Captain Blowhard's eardrum-exploding announcements. Fuller, richer base and wider frequency response than previous UEs.
TIRED Spendiferous. Cable noise will distract joggers or anyone planning to use the headphones while exercising. Despite its redesign, the pocket case is still too small to fit all the accouterments.
$230, ultimateears.com
Read our full Ultimate Ears 700 Noise-Isolating Earphones review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Digeo's Moxi HD DVR sports a slick, Emmy-winning (seriously) user interface and all the commercial-skipping accouterments of competitors like TiVo. It even ditches a monthly bill in favor of flat pricing and grants access to online video and music.
The Moxi's stunning high-def UI is full of slick transitions and responsive performance. Unfortunately, sleek visuals don't conquer all. Basics like surfing through the program guide (or accessing a previously recorded show) took a lot of hunting and pecking through a menu tree. Finding pre-recorded shows and getting them to play took searching, highlighting, selecting Play, confirming that you selected Play, and then finally watching.
WIRED No monthly bills. Sleek high-def interface has nifty animations and transitions. Hard drive expandable to 1 TB for power recorders. Dual tuners let you watch one show while recording another. Offers a whopping 1.5-hour buffer time per HD channel.
TIRED Hefty entry fee. Online video chops not quite up to snuff. No dedicated Guide button on the remote?! Unnecessarily complicated menus. Programming schedules are displayed in cramped vertical list instead of friendly grid.
$800, moxi.com
Read our full Digeo Moxi HD DVR review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: We're a little dismayed by the E71x. The device is almost identical to the E71: same 3.2-megapixel camera, same .04-inch profile, same vibrant 320 x 240 QVGA display, same business apps and multimedia functionality. The operating system is slightly tweaked so there are some differences in transmissions and page loading. But as a whole, the phone is relatively unchanged.
These are the key differences: a new $100 price tag (good), a black paint job (badass) and the omission of our favorite feature from the original E71 (ugly). We're talking about the two separate, customizable home screens, something we absolutely loved about the O.G. E71. One screen was designed for business, the other for personal use. It was a great function: You could literally edit spreadsheets from 9 to 5 on one screen, then toggle over to the other and watch a couple of episodes of 30 Rock on the media player.
WIRED Windows interface means you don't have to learn a new menu convention to browse your old files. Dumping the data of only one (or all) of your multiple PCs takes less than five mouse clicks. You can set up a password in the toolbar.
TIRED Dock and multi-PC backup capability only provided with 500-GB version. Full hard-drive recovery requires booting from a CD. Windows-only means it fails to bridge the gap in inter-OSial households.
$100 with 2-year contract, att.com
Read our full Nokia E71x Smartphone review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: The Replica comes with bare-bones software and strikes a good balance between peace of mind and individual-user control.
After the hard drive is plugged in, the Replica starts mirroring your computer's content. The startup process is short, taking only a couple of minutes, though the actual backup is a time-gobbling endeavor. (It took us about four hours to transfer 130 GB of data). A blue light on the top of the Replica's case blinks continuously while data is being transferred. It's also stealthy for a hard drive, emitting only a quiet whir when working at full speed.
WIRED Windows interface means you don't have to learn a new menu convention to browse your old files. Dumping the data of only one (or all) of your multiple PCs takes less than five mouse clicks. You can set up a password in the toolbar.
TIRED Dock and multi-PC backup capability only provided with 500-GB version. Full hard-drive recovery requires booting from a CD. Windows-only means it fails to bridge the gap in inter-OSial households.
$200, seagate.com
Read our full Seagate Replica 500GB review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Panasonic's new HDC-TM300 shoots in "Full HD," marketing speak for 1080p — aka 1080 x 1920 resolution with progressive-scan video. Translation? Stunning Blu-ray-level video that should more than lives up to the most critical expectations of prosumers and video enthusiasts.
The highlight of this shooter is the high-def footage. Not only does the phenomenal zoom reel in distant objects, but thanks to the triple sensors and quality lens, it nails far-off details perfectly. The architectural features of distant buildings we shot in downtown San Francisco showed up like we were standing on the window ledge -- not in a park three blocks away.
WIREDReproduces colors like a Crayola factory. Closeups pop with sharp, clear details. Nice performance in low light. Einstein-smart automatic shooting features are like having your own DP built into the camera. 32-GB onboard memory is expandable via SDHC slot. Great zoom tackles action better than Jason Statham.
TIRED Fast pans in bright daylight turns up more artifacts than a Mayan ruin. May require second mortgage.
$1,300, Panasonic.com
Read our full Panasonic HDC-TM300 HD Camcorder review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: In the aftermath (heh heh) of the bass-heavy Beats by Dre Studio headphones, Monster decided to pack the Doctor's finicky sound quality specs into two tiny earbuds. Naturally, audiophiles (including myself) were skeptical. Sure the Beats suffered from shoddy construction and fell apart after a few months of ownership, but they also provided some of the best bass we've ever heard in a set of cans.
Sure enough, the bass response from these things is rich and full. The lowest frequencies rumble with a force akin to the thud of a decent subwoofer. Keep in mind these are not miniaturized 12-inch Kickers designed to blow your eardrums out. But for a device that is essentially a tiny speaker with no auxiliary power, they're superb — especially when compared to the white earcruds doled out by Apple with every iDevice.
WIRED Excellent all-around frequency definition and particularly impressive bass response. Monster’s durable, ingenious anti-tangle cable means jumbled cords are a distant unpleasant memory.
TIRED The bright red cable is slightly ostentatious. Peak bass only hits at earwax shattering volumes.
$150, beatsbydre.com
Read our full Monster Beats By Dre Tour High-Resolution In-Ear Headphones review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: The UE-11 Pros are packed with four, count 'em, four drivers: There's a double dose of bass, one for the midrange and one chiming the highs. If you're looking for the most precise, separated sound possible, then this is the earphone for you. Throughout the play list I heard clarity and detail in the music I'd never heard before. This rang especially true with classical tunes — it literally feels like sitting in a symphony hall and having every instrument speak directly to you. To get that kind of superior fidelity you'll certainly have to pay the piper. But you'll really love the music while Rome — or your bank account — burns.
WIRED Most clear, separated and detailed sound.
TIRED Try convincing your spouse you need a $1,150 set of headphones.
$1,150, ultimateears.com
Read our full UE-11 Pro review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: The slate-gray, high-impact polymer body houses three LEDs capable of blasting out a peak 270 lumens for 15 minutes, or a more useful and long-lasting 90 lumens for 60 minutes. Both settings have an emergency low-power 25-lumen mode (equivalent in brightness to most common household D-cell flashlights) for an additional 60 minutes.
WIRED High-power pro flashlight pumps out awesome illumination and recharges ridiculously fast. Flashlight will outlive you. Seriously brilliant, blinding — a boon for flashlight junkies.
TIRED Pricy front-end investment. Comes with a 12-volt car charger.
$170, 511tactical.com
Read our full 5.11 Tactical Light review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: In our tests, we threw all things digital at this 68-pound slab. And while it does not perform as superbly as its higher-price brethren from Sony, Samsung and Sharp, it still shows off a completely acceptable high-def image and above-average sound.
So where has Westinghouse cut corners? Oh, let's see. How about the borderline embarrassing 1000:1 contrast ratio? In a well-lit room, the screen looks more washed out than a warehouse full of Maytags. And even though the set offers the 120-Hz spec, fast motion still looks a bit blurred.
WIRED High resolution and decent sound at incredible rock-bottom price. Convenience features integrated into menu. Quality remote not found in higher-priced TVs.
TIRED Displays some pixelated speckled noise in darker and mid-hue images. Analog-station reproduction is downright blurry. No worries though — analog TV has flatlined.
$700, Westinghouse.com
Read our full Westinghouse TX-42F450S review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: It's not quite a netbook, not quite an ultralight PC. Whatever it is, Samsung's NC20 is a dazzling feat of engineering: an extremely usable 12-inch laptop with epic battery life, impressive specs and a downright mystifyingly affordable price tag.
But the NC20 doesn't make depressing tradeoffs to achieve those scores. Battery life is three hours, 40 minutes (22 percent longer than the S10) and weight is just 3.3 pounds, comparable to the Asus Eee PC 1000H. All that and you get a 12.1-inch LCD, too, instead of the usual 10.2-inch netbook display.
WIRED Everything a netbook should be: Offers the best performance available from a computer this portable and inexpensive. Very usable keyboard. Good quality audio. Includes three USB ports, 1.3-megapixel webcam, and SD card slot.
TIRED LCD could be a touch brighter and quality sharper. Chassis design is a bit boring.
$550, samsung.com
Read our full Samsung NC 20 review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Pure Digital's Flip has proven that it's possible to build a super-small flash memory camcorder and offer it up for fewer than two hundred bucks. But there are tradeoffs with going small and cheap, like optics and battery life. Canon takes a completely different tack with its newest solid-state cam, the Vixia HF S10, which delivers some fantastically brilliant moving pictures, but at a stiff cost.
Out in the field, auto focus and auto exposure were both very impressive in a wide range of situations, from the intense brightness of the beach to shady and contrasty venues. Every camera suffers indoors, thanks to low light, and everyone complains about it, but the S10 did a credible job with low-light shots and it's clearly better than previous cams of this ilk.
WIRED Improved audio quality. Big, bright lens. Speedy processor. Lots of creative control options. More intuitive menus than previous generation Canon camcorders.
TIRED Loose lens cover noisier than cutlery caught in a garbage disposal. Still images come off looking a bit overexposed.
$1,300, canon.com
Read our full Canon Vixia HF S10 review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Dry your eyes, plasma junkies. The untimely demise of Pioneer's Kuro line doesn't mean you'll have to forgo those deliciously deep blacks and theater-perfect colors for long. In fact, even as the last of the Pioneer Kuro Elites make its way into a few lucky U.S. homes, a new lineup of HDTV sets are already poised to seize the plasma king's vacant throne.
Key to this plasma's visual appeal is its integrated THX mode. In addition to blessing various audio components, the home-theater ninjas at THX began bestowing plasma and LCD certification a few years back. Each set is subjected to approximately 400 individual tests, ranging from evaluations in signal processing to luminosity. Basically, the idea behind G10's THX mode is to recreate the precise color gamut filmmakers use during the in-studio post-production process.
WIRED Mind-boggling blacks with tons of detail. THX mode is a godsend for movie buffs. Integrated SD card slots transform your plasma into a giant digital photo frame. Amazing color saturation.
TIRED THX mode is bit dim for brightly lit rooms. Ethernet connectivity is nice for VieraCast, but Wi-Fi would've been better. Three HDMI ports (two in the back, one on the side) don't cut it. More power-hungry than LCD TVs. Where's the PiP?
$1,300, panasonic.com
Read our full Panasonic TC-P42G10 Viera G10 Series Plasma review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: The PogoPlug is a device, which looks like a supersized AC adapter, plugs into almost any external hard drive (even a USB stick) and then pumps that content onto the web, giving you access anywhere in the world you can get an internet signal — including your iPhone.
But the PogoPlug isn't without the occasional snafu and annoyances. Only image files are available for preview. PDF, Word documents or even HTML files have to be downloaded before viewing. Worse yet, when we unhooked the device, it caused our PC to crash twice in a row. We're still not entirely sure if this was due to a glitch in the PogoPlug or in Windows.
WIRED Easy to use. Simple setup. Great utility: I must be able to access my collection of LOLcat photos from anywhere. The iPhone app is solid software.
TIRED No wireless mode ... yet. Poor security — it's a wise idea to keep those tax returns or bank documents off the PogoPlug. Computer crashes are deeply flummoxing. The iPhone is currently the only mobile device that supports remote access.
$100, pogoplug.com
Read our full Cloud Engines PogoPlug review.
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: NatureMill's Pro edition is an indoor composter we can pretty much dig. Using minimal electricity, a small motor turns a heavy-duty mixing bar, heats the mixing chamber (no sunlight needed) and powers an air pump that works with a carbon air filter to help reduce smell (each filter lasts four to five years).
Just add starter dirt, drop in some sawdust pellets to combat odors and dump your food scraps in. NatureMill recommends that you cut organic material into 4-inch bits before plopping it in. We didn't, but aside from the motor making some gnarly noises, it didn't seem to affect compost production. NatureMill's Pro version also features some automatic activation. We were able to leave ours sitting for weeks without pushing the button even once; it mixed and heated itself just fine.
WIRED Stainless steel mixing bar made short work of uncut banana peels. Relatively small and exceptionally lightweight = easy to stash and transport. Foot pedal eliminates lid touching. Mighty Morphin' Power Saver: only draws 5 kwh a month (roughly 50 cents on an average electric bill). Not as much of an eyesore as it could be and it's available in a range of colors (including, you guess it, green).
TIRED Little to no stench — until top opens (that's hard to remedy, and burger/fish/salad remnants smell worse than a dead wildebeest doused in Eau D'Bile). Polypropylene housing is light, but may not last forever. Disposable carbon filters reduce smell, but also cut down on the green factor. Regular maintenance (scraping the mix chamber walls) isn't fun.
$400, naturemill.com
Read our full Nature Mill Indoor Composter — Pro Edition review.
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: You can get away with a lot if you're beautiful. Such is the case with the new Porsche Design P'9522 phone. In some ways, it's a wonderful and capable cellphone, but in most others, it's dumber than the gorgeous block of aluminum it was machined from.
Someone forgot to include e-mail — an absence that had us trying to mar the Porsche phone's scratchproof screen with claws of rage. Unfortunately, that screen is tough, so the P'9522 will be lauded and drooled over — despite our many gripes with it.
WIRED Gorgeous. Touchscreen interface is easy to understand, if limited and frustrating. Preloaded ringtones include the roaring engines of the 911 GT3 and Turbo. Its 5-megapixel camera has autofocus and captures clean, vivid images. LED flash doubles as a flashlight. Unlocking the phone with its fingerprint scanner is very MI5.
TIRED Fingerprint scanner is also very POS: Who thought it would be a good idea to use fingerprints to access a device you're likely holding in one hand while juggling multiple other tasks? Preloaded ringtones include bad German techno. Touchscreen is deeply frustrating. Seriously — no e-mail?
$800, porschedesign.com
Read our full Porsche Design P'9522 Phone review.
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: Weighing just 140 grams, the handset offers some of the best optics we've ever found crammed into a cell phone: sharp, noiseless pics (3,264 × 2,448 pixels) and decent image stabilizer punctuate video capture that puts full-figured handicams from 2008 to shame. You can even shoot VGA at 30 fps or QVGA at a whopping 120 fps (yes, 120!), including slow motion footage in 1/4 and 1/8 speeds.
Amazing, sure, but not a picture perfect phone. The i8510 functions almost exactly like a standard point-and-shoot, except for the zoom button, which is placed inexplicably, and awkwardly at the bottom of the device.
WIRED Beaucoup codecs, including — wait for it — DivX! 2.8-inch screen excellent for playback. Intuitive photo/video editing suite. Equally intuitive navigation. Automatic lens cover. MicroSD slot good for 16 GB (enough for aspiring Scorseses to go epic). All the usual smartphone suspects: 3G, Wi-Fi, USB, Bluetooth, accelerometer, GPS. Decent earbuds with ample cord. 3.5mm audio jack. Most excellent: TV-out capability.
TIRED Side-mounted headphone jack makes phone harder to pocket. Optical control pad is a tad sensitive (between us and you — we don't want to hurt its feelings). Most bogus: Metal shell retains enough scratches to fill a DJ Shadow album. A little on the clunky side. Most bogus: Flash needs to be brighter.
$500, samsung.com
Read our full Samsung i8510 INNOV8 review.
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: As the successor to Logitech's G11 and G15, this huge hunk of plastic comes with gaming hardwired in its DNA. Like its relatives, it has a blocky aesthetic that harkens to the days of the Model M. There are, however, a handful of very modern flourishes that make this latest G-board a distinctly modern marvel.
In the end, the G19's main drawback is the same one that has plagued fancy keyboards since the days of yore: It's freaking huge. That swiveling LCD? It actually requires a tiny onboard Linux computer to run, which in turn requires its own power source. Should you choose to make use of the two self-powered USB ports, you'll potentially have more wires shooting out of this thing than your computer.
WIRED More customizable than a box of Legos. Two self-powered USB ports. Dedicated D-pad and menu keys let you control LCD directly from the keyboard. Convenient cable management lanes carved into bottom of unit lessens clutter … slightly. Choose-your-own-color adventure with adjustable backlighting. Keys are pleasantly clicky and responsive.
TIRED Limited desktop space? This is not your keyboard. Price tag to match gargantuan footprint. Requires power brick to run. After its novelty wears off, built-in LCD becomes more of a distraction than a useful tool.
$200, Logitech.com
Read our full Logitech G19 Keyboard review.
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: Want to catch the last episode of Battlestar Galactica while hanging out in the local java joint? Going to download a season of The Simpsons for viewing on the plane? Giving an impromptu screening of your vacation photos at a friend's house? The Mini 10 is your machine.
But there are infuriating shortcomings to the Mini 10. The trackpad is one of the worst we've seen. Dell's decision to integrate the buttons underneath the pad itself makes using it both unpredictable and challenging. When you click on a button, the cursor may hit the target, wiggle off a centimeter or two, or teleport off into a remote corner of your screen. While it got easier to use after a week of practice, our advice is to invest in a cheap travel mouse.
WIRED Bright, responsive screen. Integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam. Not gunked up with crapware. HDMI-out port shows charming, if unwarranted, optimism about the netbook's video capabilities. Light weight: Just 2.6 pounds.
TIRED Infuriating trackpad with integrated buttons hidden underneath. Excessively glossy screen produces distracting glare. Windows XP is starting to look pretty tired. What, no solid-state option? Despite the HDMI port, the netbook can't deliver HD video without fits and starts.
$470 (as tested), dell.com
Read our full Dell Mini 10 Netbook review.
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: The new 370Z upgrades come in the form of a sexy body with a hood, hatch and doors of lightweight aluminum and a chassis significantly stiffer to reduce performance-robbing flex. To make up for the beefier chassis, Nissan's engineers pared more than 225 pounds from the rest of the car — even the audio system lost 3.5 pounds — and the result is a car that weighs 88 pounds less than the previous 350Z.
Every model gets the same 332-horsepower V6, an engine that makes this Z the quickest yet with a zero-to-60 time of 4.6 seconds. That kind of performance, however, is contingent on your skills as a driver. If you don't posses Lewis Hamilton levels of talent don't fret. The Z's abundant power and excellent handling will let you think you do.
WIRED Insanely easy to drive, insanely quickly. You'll run out of nerve before you run out of grip. Rev-matching transmission makes heel-toe shifting more obsolete than a gramophone.
TIRED Rev-matching transmission makes heel-toe shifting more obsolete than a vinyl record. Tympani-like tire roar, piccolo-like exhaust note. Hummer-sized blind spots make lane changes a gun-it-and-go-for-it leap of faith. Fake brushed-aluminum interior bits don't fool anyone.
$33,970 (as tested), nissanusa.com
Read our full Nissan 2009 370Z review.
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: Using the BookReader is simple: Just plunk a novel on the platen, punch a button and you're relaxing to the dulcet sounds of Jill, a computerized voice with a voracious appetite for literature. All the menus read themselves off when you mouse over them, and they have keyboard shortcuts, which is useful if you have reduced vision. Jill is pretty good at recognizing words. We tried out several books, including one heavy with medical jargon, and she held her own with just a few exceptions.
Useful as it is, we could not help noticing that the BookReader seems to be slightly undercooked. A few of the buttons don't really do anything, and you can't customize the dictionary to alter Jill's interpretation of commonly used, but horribly flubbed words, acronyms or numbers. The unit seems to be terribly overpriced as well. Plustek wants $600 for the BookReader, despite the fact that the OpticBook only costs $250 — and has its own text-to-speech function.
WIRED Reads books to you at the push of a button. Platen glass goes right to the edge to accommodate books without strain. Turns text into MP3s for portability. Includes several accessibility features to help the visually impaired.
TIRED The included software lacks polish and seems rushed. Squat, ugly looks make it seem at home in a cubicle farm. The reader voice may not screw up often, but when it does, it's a doozy. High price nears gouging territory.
$600, plustek.com
Read our full Plustek BookReader V100 review.
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: Photo: Dylan Tweeny/Wired.comApple's newest Shuffle (almost 50 percent smaller than previous Shuffles) could easily be mistaken for a stick of Trident, features no buttons, and pimps voice-identification technology. But even given its apparent readily consumable stature, there are a few features on the Shuffle that are a bit tough to swallow.
The biggest gripe on the 4-GB Shuffle we tested is definitely the control set. First off, it's completely counterintuitive; Apple says you can easily use it without looking. We still don't have the hang of it after a few days of testing. What's worse, if you have a decent set of earbuds (say, a pair of Shures or Ultimate Ears) you're totally hosed — you'll have to endure the 'buds that come with the Shuffle or pick up specially made third-party headphones. Our recommendation? Pick up a new Shuffle only if you're prepared to deal with proprietary headphones and ambiguous controls.
WIRED Thumb-drive size. Can double as a tie clip. Battery life lasts for 12 freaking hours. Short USB sync cord is sexy. Yes, we'll admit, it's another beautifully designed piece of hardware from Apple. Battery bonked out after 11 constant hours of blasting Thunderstruck on loop.
TIRED Proprietary headphones required. Control set awkward to use, hard to get used to. So small, it nearly gets lost in the packaging it comes in.
$80, apple.com
Read our full Apple iPod Shuffle 3rd Gen review.
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: Rather than foam, gel or compressed-air cushioning, the soles on Newtons have a series of "actuator lugs" just below the ball of the foot. The lugs are designed to help encourage you to land on your forefoot, to protect that part of the foot, and (best yet) to propel you forward. When you land, the lugs push into hollow chambers in the midsole. This cushions your landing, and helps make it comfy to land midsole or forefoot rather than on the heel as you might be accustomed. As your foot moves forward, these lugs then essentially lever out, and as you lift your foot, they return the energy by pushing up and out in the same direction as your stride. Newton claims this makes them more efficient than traditional foam or gel soles that simply absorb energy but don't return it.
WIRED So cozy they're like a Snuggie for your feet. Actuator lugs get you off your heels better than a La-Z-Boy. Lightweight at 10.2 ounces. Designed for all stride types. Stomps cold weather like global warming, and keeps out the drizzle for shizzle.
TIRED Not waterproof. Worse on single-track trails than a skateboard. $175??? OMG, for that much money I could just pay somebody to run for me.
$175, newtonrunning.com
Read our full Newton All Weather Trainer review.
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: The Firebird features a hybrid design — using 2.5-inch hard drives (two 320-GB models) and dual graphics cards originally designed for laptops — but powers it all with a desktop CPU and desktop-sized DIMMs. As with a laptop, wireless is built in, but the power supply is not: To save on wattage, HP breaks out the (enormous) power adapter instead of integrating it into the box.
As cool as the Firebird is on the whole, it isn't without some foibles. The inclusion of an ExpressCard slot is on the baffling-to-useless side, and the external power supply (it's huge) is more annoying to deal with than it sounds. But our biggest gripe is that the Firebird's streamlined shell means it includes no front-mounted ports at all, not even a single USB slot for your thumb drive. Seriously HP, even the Mac Pro finds room for that.
WIRED Amazingly quiet and conscientious in its power consumption. Outstanding design; belongs on top of the desk, not beneath it. Solid all-around performance at a fair price.
TIRED No front USB port. Curvy design means you can't put anything on top of the case. Functionally locked down, with no real upgrade path.
$2,100 (as tested), hp.com
Read our full HP Firebird 803 review.
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: I shouldn't love this truck. I should hate it. I purposely do not own a car, and this all-black behemoth represents everything I hate about SUV culture: conspicuous consumption, insensitivity to our rapidly shrinking world and crowded cities, middle finger raised at global warming.
You could slap a cold fusion generator under Big Poppa Cadillac's hood and the first two issues would still apply, but I was kind of wrong about that last one. Have you ever seen Godzilla vs. Megalon? Where Godzilla fights on behalf of the people of Japan against a giant rhinoceros/cockroach? Sure, Tokyo's favorite monster still smashes a bunch of buildings and steps on some people, but he's trying to be good. Same goes for this Hybrid Chromedaddy.
WIRED Decent pickup for a motorized bomb shelter. Combined ABS and regenerative braking system do a terrific job of hauling the beast down from speed. Trick motorized step makes it easy for shorties to climb into your rolling condo.
TIRED Thing has a car phone. No, not Bluetooth, but an actual phone built into infotainment system. (It's actually just Onstar, but there was no other option for hands-free calling.) What is this, 1989? Cadillac — God love 'em — uses the fact that this is a hybrid as an excuse to bling up the truck even more: Hybrid badges are plastered on every hard surface, on the sides of the door, even the windshield. —Joe Brown
$74,085 (as tested), Cadillac.com
Read our full Cadillac Escalade Hybrid review.
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: The Kindle 2 is zippier, with pages turning 20 percent faster (yes, you can tell the difference). It has more memory (2 gigabytes, enough for storing more than 1,500 books onboard). And it flaunts a more powerful built-in battery: Amazon claims that the Kindle lasts four to five days with the wireless on (we got 4.5 days in our first test) and up to two weeks with it off. After a week of limited wireless, my meter is around 50 percent. Amazon also says that after 500 charges, it will hold 80 percent of its original juice. That means that most users won't have to replace the battery (a $60 procedure) for about a decade or so.
Looking over the horizon, it's clear that Amazon's biggest competitor in selling digital books will be Google, whose recent agreement with publishers and authors will make it the virtually exclusive seller for millions of books in copyright but not in print. But right now at least, the Google and Amazon formats aren't compatible: I was unsuccessful in getting a PDF of a public-domain book downloaded from Google to appear in readable form on my Kindle.
WIRED The best e-reading system on the market. Welcome improvements to aesthetics, more functional industrial design, better graphics and longer battery life. Sleeker than the original: One-third of an inch thick and 10 ounces.
TIRED Quite expensive. Book content shackled with DRM. Interface is improved, sure, but it could be even better.
$360, amazon.com
Read our full Amazon.com Kindle 2 review.
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: The iWOW adapter from SRS Labs promises to coax more "immersive" sound from your iPod, and it actually delivers — provided you're listening to the right kind of music. Setup is easy: Snap on the slick little 1-inch extension, plug in some spendy headphones, press a button, and you do indeed get a fuller sound with more depth — especially if you enjoy songs like Sting's "Fragile," a track hand-picked by SRS to highlight the effect.
But when iWOW was applied to songs that were heavy on low-end thump or had multilayered sound (Exhibit A: Beck's "Cold Brains") the iWOW performed more like iMeh. At top volume, bass beats splintered, while at lower volumes tracks sounded muddled and crowded. SRS claims the device "dynamically locates and restores audio detail" and creates a more natural sound. We're not buying it — most of the audio we threw at the iWOW was punctuated with a subtle hiss and fuzzy bass.
WIRED Relatively small adapter. Snaps easily onto your iPod and lends some oomph to certain tunes.
TIRED The effect is nearly lost when using ear buds, the device won't work with older generation iPods, and music that already has a fair share of bass sounds muffled.
$70, srslabs.com
Read our full SRS Labs iWOW Adapter for iPod review.
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:
Leaps ahead of other cam phones, the Memoir's not limited to the 8 megapixels it captures. In shooting mode, the touchscreen has shutterbug controls — zoom, brightness, timer and flash — that float around the image. And just hitting the shutter will take you into camera mode. The Memoir includes a 1-GB microSD to augment the phone's 100 MB of storage (and it's an easy-access slot, rather than hidden under the battery).
But for all its convenience, the Memoir simply isn't a competitor for even the lowliest of dedicated cameras. First off, it's pokey: slow to focus, slow to snap and very touchy when it comes to movement. And though it touts a 16x digital zoom, it has no optical-zooming option.
WIRED Cool touchscreen and accelerometer helps you shoot or view pictures. Compact, pocket-friendly shape, even for hipsters in painted-on jeans.
TIRED Vampiric light sensitivity makes for washed-out shots. Slow to focus, shoot and recover. E-mail functions are even slower. The screen is hard to see in sunlight. Lens cover doesn't close all the time, so the lens can get dusty.
$300 (with 2-year contract), t-mobile.com
Read our full Samsung Memoir.
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: From the outside, the 1000HE doesn't look much different from other netbooks. But it's the machine's heart — the brand new 1.66-GHz Atom N280 processor — that makes it faster, stronger, smarter than its opponents.
Intel claims the silicon slab boosts computing power across the board, especially HD video playback — something that has been woefully horrid in past machines using Atom processors. It's not lying. This is the fastest netbook we've tested (by about 7 percent) in our benchmarks. And HD video playback was noticeably smoother and devoid of chop.
WIRED The first netbook to feature the new Atom N280 chip. MMC and SD media reader slots. Attractive, pearly finish. Decent 1.3-megapixel webcam.
TIRED At 3.1 pounds, it's one of the heaviest puppies in the netbook litter. Lame keyboard.
$400 as tested, asus.com
Read our full Asus Eee PC 1000HE review.
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: The R50 is remarkably easy to set up and use. As you program each component into the remote using the setup wizard, you test a few controls to make sure it has the right code. The remote instantly recognized all our components, and it took us about 10 minutes to get the AV rig up and running. As part of the setup, you name each component, which then appears as an icon on the screen: in my case, a Sony HDTV, Yamaha amp/receiver, Squeezebox, Oppo DVD player and Soundmatters speaker.
WIRED Cool, reddish backlight perfect for nighttime navigation. No computer or web connection needed for operation. No charging cradle required.
TIRED No user manual means gizmo novices might get lost in setup. $150 price point isn't super pricey, but then it's not the cheapest universal remote out there.
$150, universalremote.com
Read our full Universal Remote Digital R50 review.
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: Like other watches in the 25-year-old G-Shock line, the MTG-1500 is forged with Mr. T levels of toughness: It can easily survive being banged clumsily against tabletops or whacked against a surfboard in a wipeout. And it's water-resistant to 200 meters. But unlike most other G-Shock watches, which are primarily plastic, the MTG-1500's body and band are stainless steel, with a few tasteful black plastic accents.
We half expected to find the MTG-1500 lacking in minor features. Surprisingly, it didn't. It's got a stopwatch mode, dual time-zone support, five different alarms and a countdown timer. Free abundant sunlight or bright artificial light recharges the battery as you wear the watch. Once fully charged, the battery should be able to power the watch for 6 months without additional light.
WIRED Handsome, two-toned steel-and-black styling doesn't blare "nerd," "Swatch-wearing poser" or "too lazy to take off my gym watch." Self-syncs with superaccurate official time stations. Gives you an excuse to say "solar" and "atomic" in the same sentence.
TIRED Digital display too small and can be obscured by watch hands. LED provides uneven illumination in the dark. $500 can buy a timepiece that's much fancier, albeit not atomic.
$500, casio.com
Read our full Casio G-Shock MTG-1500 review.
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: The skinny on this countertop unit is pretty straightforward: It's the touch-based kitchen computer that won't put you out of house and home. Don't go rushing out to cash in that 401(k), though — despite a recession-friendly price, the Eee Top still feels a little light in the loafers.
The glossy white, semi-opaque keyboard and mouse look stylish out of the box, but after extended handling their light, plastic-y build became annoying. The slim chassis sat solid on our countertop, while the bright, 15.6-inch screen and the integrated speaker bar make up the majority of the Top's sleek profile. Rounding out the device are six USB ports, memory card reader, 1.3-MP web cam and integrated Wi-Fi. We were pretty bummed at the lack of an optical drive, though.
WIRED An all-in-one for the Top Ramen set. Quick, responsive touch interface. Compact design has integrated storage for both keyboard and stylus. Integrated 802.11n and gigabit ethernet ensure throughput thrashings. One-touch shutoff button for hiding porn er, convenience. Runs whisper-quiet.
TIRED Underpowered for heavy web video. A wired keyboard and mouse — on an all-in-one?!? Heats up after extended poke/prod sessions. Anemic 160-GB hard drive. Even a cheapy, noisy optical drive would've been nice. No battery means no mobile computing.
$600 (as tested), asus.com
Read our full Asus ET1602 Eee Top review.
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: This camera is about the size and shape of a pack of chewing gum, and weighs just 0.68 ounces. It records videos at 352 x 288 pixels, encoding them in the 3-GP format used by many cellphones (the videos can be played on your computer using most media-player software, including QuickTime and RealPlayer).
But the MovieStick is oozing with design flaws. The pinhole-sized lens is located on the long side of the device, rather than the short end, limiting your ability to go truly undercover. Add to that a confusing series of lights that supposedly indicate when the cam is charging, turned on or recording, and you end up with more than one inadvertent video of the floor.
WIRED The smallest video camera we've seen yet. Simple to set up and use. Makes you look like a double agent.
TIRED Location of camera lens makes it hard to go covert. No internal storage or memory card included. Recorded video is shakier and blurrier than outtakes from The Blair Witch Project.
$120, swannsecurity.com
Read our full Swann Micro-VideoCam Recorder review.
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: Kodak’s Theatre HD's raison d'être is straightforward: to shuttle the contents of your PC directly to your television using ethernet or Wi-Fi. Pictures, videos, podcasts, music or any other digital content that may be living on your hard drive (as long as it's not squelched by some DRM straightjacket) can be whisked away by this tiny little box to your television with little to no fuss.
What really sets the Theatre HD Player apart from the rest of the field is how immaculately it performs its tasks. Once you've downloaded Kodak's EasyShare display software, everything is pretty much taken care of. Have a hard drive filled with extra content? No problem. Simply hook it up to one of the player's USB ports and you're ready to go.
WIRED Intuitive UI coupled with a handy RF remote makes setup and playback of multimedia a Zen-like experience. Wealth of connectivity options: component, HDMI, optical or RCA audio, dual USB ports. Transforms crappy YouTube video into semi-watchable content.
TIRED Requires Kodak EasyShare software to get the streaming party started. No Mac compatibility (for now). Pricey, especially for a device without a hard drive. Needs more internet content.
$300, Kodak
Read our full Kodak Theatre HD Player review.
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: Skidding in at 53 pounds (on the lighter side for this category), Ohm's mountain bike-inspired geometry and its nine-level power-assist and regeneration system make it a smart, nimble and efficient two-wheeler.
On pavement and trail the BionX power plant, mounted on the rear hub, employs a unique sensor technology that is constantly adjusting the level of assistance it gives you based on the terrain. Encountering some mushy road? More power is delivered to the gears. Gliding down paved asphalt? The juice is dialed back. And if your thighs are flushed with lactic acid on a sheer hill, a flick of the trusty thumb throttle cracks the whip and the motor totally takes over, no pedaling required. But for all this innovation and comfort, you will, however, have to part with a spouse-enraging $3,450. Is it worth it? Well, it is a ton of fun.
WIRED Excellent Shimano parts mix with disc brakes and RockShox suspension fork. Lockable battery compartment hides space for mobile phone, wallet, media player and your other little stuff. Regeneration mode gives extra on-bike battery life. Comfortable suspension seat post. Four- to six-hour charge time.
TIRED Throttle position needs to be improved for optimal bike handling. Price steeper than any hill the bike can handle.
$3450, Ohm Cycles
Read our full Ohm Cycles XS700 review.
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: For about $300 more than the average netbook, the UC7807u offers a scintillating array of grownup specs. Intel 2.0-GHz Core 2 Duo CPU? Check. 250-GB hard drive? Yep. 3 GB of memory, a glossy 13.3-inch display, a slot-loading optical drive and ports galore (three USB and an HDMI)? You betcha! Best of all, with its fetching brushed aluminum chassis, no one will mistake this for a budget notebook.
Unfortunately, the UC7807u also has all the telltale signs of some obvious corner cutting. Forget about gaming. Due to Intel's torpid integrated GMA 4500MHD graphics card, even moderately intensive titles won't run properly. But our main beef with the UC7807u is the feeble 6-cell battery which clocked in at a disappointing 3 hours, 25 minutes — a full hour shorter than most other notebooks in this category.
WIRED Recession-worthy price. Built like a tank. Slick, touch-sensitive volume and multimedia controls.
TIRED Tips the scales for a notebook in this category. Battery drains faster than an ATM at a strip club. Epic fail on the tiny circular touchpad. It's cramped and serves no discernable purpose. Onboard speakers spit out tinny, distorted sound. HDMI, but no Blu-ray?
$800 as tested, Gateway
Read our full Gateway UC7807u review.
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: It's no wonder this watch ran away with my heart; for the competitive runner or multisport athlete seeking a personal best in 2009, the Polar RS800CX is the required training device. Because of incredibly robust desktop software, tracking of obscure performance metrics, and a wide variety of add-on sensors, the RS800CX can help you measure, analyze and improve nearly every aspect of your training program.
WIRED Offers better heart-rate monitoring than your average hospital. Incredibly customizable from in-watch display, to software interface, to training programs. GPS and barometric altimeter combined with location tracking mean you'll never wonder where you wandered. Extensible pods make watch more sport-versatile than Lance Armstrong.
TIRED Even beer goggles won't pretty up this ugly watch face. May need to hire a coach anyway — just to teach you how to use the PC-only desktop software.
$500, Polar
Read our full Polar RS800CX MULTI review.
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: The pocket rocket we've been packing in our pants recently (full name: Optoma DLP EP-PK-101 Pico Pocket Projector) is one of the first mini projectors to hit the market. It's also one of the best, even though a number of flaws spill from the tiny device.
Styled like a '40s-era Zippo, the piano-black portable feels more natural in the hand than a lot of cellphones. But it's not size that matters to us, it's the video components! The projector is comprised of a combo-rig LED lamp and a DLP chip (courtesy of Texas Instruments) that sets the resolution at 480 x 320 pixels with a range output of 9 lumens. Yes, we know this is low compared to full-bodied projectors like Benq's gargantuan MP512 ST 2500-lumen projector but for something this small, it's remarkable.
WIRED Perfect projector for parties. Rectangular lens creates wide image that keeps the image from stretching. Fine picture quality, 8-96 inches. Startup time > 4 seconds. Dead-sexy hardware.
TIRED Lithium-ion batteries die after 2 hours' use; how are we supposed to watch our Battlestar marathon? Battery recharge time 4 frakkin' hours. Suck-tastic speaker. Unless you have a video-out adapter, you can't project Office docs from your PC. Projector gets hot enough to fry bacon after running 30 minutes.
$400, Optoma
Read our full Optoma EP-PK-101 Pico Pocket Projector review.
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: Are you the schlemiel who's always dropping his cellphone or camera at parties? Or maybe you're the schlemazel who always gets the drink spilled on him? Either way, if you're looking for a camera to fit a clumsy or accident-prone lifestyle, the shockproof, waterproof, and cold-resistant Stylus 1050 SW can take the beating from fumbles, faceplants or full-speed crashes, and still keep clicking.
About the size and shape as a pack of smokes, the 1050 is equipped with an accelerometer letting you tinker with settings by tapping on the top and the sides. This lets you do useful stuff like turn the flash on and off with a gloved mitt or preview pictures with one hand while you fend off a tiger shark with the other.
WIRED Shockproof to 5 feet and waterproof 10 means you can bang it on the edge of the pool as you fall in with no harm done. Tap feature lets you change settings without futzing with buttons, and the camera can handle alpine frigidity with aplomb. Comes with a microSD adapter for greater media versatility.
TIRED Lens cover slides more easily than Ricky Henderson. The battery is easily inserted backwards, making you think it's dead or the camera is malfunctioning. Weak zoom and poor macro ability; this camera could use a bifocal upgrade.
$300, Olympus
Read our full Olympus Stylus 1050 SW review.
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: Touted as the thinnest and lightest BlackBerry yet, the Curve 8900 has some much-needed upgrades over its predecessor, but also some disappointments.
Wi-Fi is hot and easy to set up, the camera got a bump to 3.2 megapixels, the 16 GB MicroSD storage can hold up to 20 hours of video, and the high-res screen is fantastic in any light. On the other hand, callers were hard to hear, documents were difficult to create, and RIM's revamped proprietary browser is good for surfing the Internet but isn't as smart about automatically resizing webpages as the browsers on competing smartphones.
WIRED Slick, sexy design mashes the best of the Bold and Curve 8830. Brilliant, high-resolution screen is one of the best we've seen on a RIM device. Full HTML-rendering on websites. 3.2-megapixel camera is even better when paired with video-recording capabilities; 3.5mm headphone jack means no clumsy adapters. Near 5-hour battery life is most impressive.
TIRED 3G is MIA. Despite the powerful 512-Mhz processor, the software still lags. New website and software don't perform as well as they should. Phone quality was mixed and loud speakers fail to compensate for somewhat distorted music playback.
$200 with a two year contract, RIM
Read our full RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 review.
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: This handset (which arrives in some of the most gorgeous packaging I've ever seen a consumer electronic encased in) is almost laughably banal in its actual construction. A silver slider with wide-spaced keys, it posses a passing resemblance to the Nokia 5200, albeit with a larger (2.2-inch) screen. But, once you switch it on and start using it, things begin to get interesting.
The operating system orbits around Facebook synchronization. Basically you take the phone online, pair it with your Facebook account, and all of your various Facebook applications become active on the mobile. Your Facebook address book syncs up with the phone's address book. Events from your Facebook calendar become part of the phone's calendar. Take a picture with the 3.2-megapixel camera, and you can automatically upload those shots to a Facebook album.
WIRED Brightly hued, easy to use, easy-to-sync OS pairs perfectly with your Facebook account. Skype integration is thoughtful. Thoughtfully spaced keys make texting, entering URLs rather pleasant. Camera takes photos that are sharp enough to be a profile picture. Extremely cheap for an unlocked device.
TIRED Humdrum hardware punctuates novel OS. Not offered in the United States ... yet. Battery life is clinically depressing when surfing the web, using Skype.
$112 (estimated), Three
Read our full INQ1 Facebook Phone review.
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: HP has been tinkering with touch tech for a couple of years. But they have yet to nail the bull's eye with a machine that mixes mature hardware with a haptic interface that feels like more than just a half-assed effort. So, we were cautiously optimistic with the TouchSmart tx2z. The good news? As HP's first multitouch convertible tablet, it's got a lot of potential.
Converting from notebook to tablet proved painless, thanks to a solid hinge and the included pen. After swinging the 1280 x 800 screen around (and folding it back), we found two goodies. First, using the pen automatically disables the touchscreen (to prevent palm-related havoc), and second, HP included an active digitizer for handwritten input. This made reckless activities like e-mailing while strolling around the block surprisingly easy. Even jotting down quick notes using a finger (instead of the pen) gave us minimal hassle.
WIRED Fully baked as both a touch and tablet device. Travels well with its compact and stylish chassis. Includes quick keys for rotating screen orientation. Mini media remote and pen conveniently hide away in chassis. Altec Lansing speakers strike decent balance between volume and clarity. Extra goodies aplenty: biometric security, webcam, dual headphone jacks, 802.11n compatibility and 5-in-1 card reader.
TIRED Bloated OS hinders performance of otherwise decent specs. Occasionally laggy switches between notebook and tablet mode. No multitouch love for the trackpad. Terrible viewing angles and weak visibility in direct sunlight. Fan sounds like a leaf-blower at a My Bloody Valentine show.
$1550 (as tested), HP
Read our full HP TouchSmart tx2z review.
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: Nero's LiquidTV TiVo PC looks like a TiVo and acts like a TiVo, but, brother, it ain't no TiVo.
Actually, the package makes your PC act like a TiVo by adding a USB TV tuner and the same TiVo software that drives the set-tops. You also get a for-reals TiVo remote and an IR receiver so you can command content from the couch.
Ironically, that's where you're gonna get pissed. The remote can't launch the software, so you'll have to physically walk over and mouse it open. The remote can be programmed to turn your TV on and off, but it can't put your PC in standby mode or wake it up again. If you do that manually, the IR receiver fails to wake up with the rest of the system.
WIRED Includes a one-year TiVo subscription, and after that it's a cheaper-than-set-top $99 per year. The software can auto-convert recordings to iPod or Sony PSP format. Integrates with any TiVo boxes you already have. Extra storage is just an external hard drive away.
TIRED The remote lacks necessary PC controls. Not measurably better than Windows Media Center — which, incidentally, is free. The tuner supports ClearQAM, but the software doesn't, so forget digital channels unless you hook up the antenna.
$125, Tivo
Read our full Nero LiquidTV TiVo PC review.
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Jorge Hirsch had been getting screwed. For years. At a scientific conference in 1989, he presented a paper arguing that the generally accepted theory of low-temperature superconductors—the BCS theory—was wrong. Most researchers at the time held that under certain low-temperature conditions, vibrations in a metal's crystal lattice can allow electrons to become attracted to one another, which drops electrical resistance to zero—a superconducting state. Hirsch said this "electron-phonon interaction" in fact had nothing to do with superconductivity. He was a youngish up-and-comer then, but physics rarely forgives apostasy. After his fateful presentation, similar conferences stopped inviting him to speak. Colleagues no longer sought him out for collaboration. Grants dried up. High-visibility journals shunned his papers.
It's not that Hirsch wasn't getting his work published. He was. And other physicists were still citing his research, implying some acceptance of his views. Hirsch just wasn't able to get his papers into the really high-visibility journals—places like Science, Nature, and, for a solid-state physicist, Physical Review Letters. There's a clear pecking order, established and reinforced by several independent rating systems. Chief among them: the Journal Impact Factor.
Hirsch, like his peers, understood that if he wanted to get to the front ranks of his discipline, he had to publish in journals with higher JIFs. But this struck him as unfair. Like most physicists, he's pretty smart, and not shy about it. The system that had shunned him was wrong, Hirsch concluded. It shouldn't be about where he published; it should be about his work. So in 2003, Hirsch decided that he—oh, and science, too!—needed a system that would rate researchers directly.
After two years of number-crunching in his cluttered office at UC San Diego, Hirsch had it—an invention important enough to warrant publication in the (very prestigious) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In his 2005 article, Hirsch introduced the h-index (named after himself, of course). The key was focusing not on where you published but on how many times other researchers cited your work. In practice, you take all the papers you've published and rank them by how many times each has been cited. Say paper number one has been cited 10,000 times. Paper number two, 8,000 cites. Paper number 32 has 33 citations, but number 33 has received just 28. You've published 32 papers with more than 32 citations—your h-index is 32.
Or to put it more technically, the h-index is the number n of a researcher's papers that have been cited by other papers at least n times. High numbers = important science = important scientist.
In its nearly four years of life, the relatively simple, flexible h-index has become the most talked-about metric in the very hot science of rating scientists and their research, a discipline that has flourished in ways Hirsch had never imagined. The h-index was the biggest splash in a flood of Internet-enabled rating systems—growth and decay chronometrics, semiometric measures, hub/authority metrics. Schools and labs use such ratings to help them make grants, bestow tenure, award bonuses, and hire postdocs. In fact, similar statistical approaches have become standard practice in Internet search algorithms and on social networking sites. These numbers do for scientists what U.S. News & World Report does for colleges and Bill James' Sabermetrics did for baseball: They quantify reputation.
Or at least they try. Either way, the numbers have the stark, uncluttered feel that scientists love. "I'm a physicist," Hirsch says. "Some people put a lot of weight on subjective criteria, and I don't like that at all."
The science citation revolution began more than 50 years ago. Eugene Garfield, then a young librarian pursuing a PhD in structural linguistics, started wondering about that most prosaic of bibliographic tools: the footnote. Most people think of footnotes as reaching backward in time to a document's sources. But Garfield realized that they could reach forward, too—future footnotes would cite the original article. "The citation becomes the subject," says Garfield, now 83 and enjoying his stature as the founding father of modern citation analysis. "It was a radical approach to retrieving information."
Some three decades before the concept of the hyperlink and the World Wide Web crossed anybody's mind, Garfield had figured out how to connect the immense body of scientific knowledge into a network. In the early 1960s he began publishing The Science Citation Index; Garfield sold the first edition, five volumes of arcane hard-copy reference, to academic libraries for $500.
Over the years, as the index expanded, Garfield worked furiously to figure out how to select and compare the journals it included. He found his answer in a simple equation: Divide the number of citations the journal gets over the prior two years by the number of articles it published. He named it the Journal Impact Factor, and in 1975 he decided to reveal how it worked. Only librarians seemed to care. "It was clear that most people didn't have the vaguest idea what I was talking about," Garfield says.
Still, it was a tidy little business, and in 1992 Garfield sold it to what's now called Thomson Reuters. But it didn't get much traction until five years later, when the company dumped the entire database onto the Internet. Today, it's part of the ISI Web of Knowledge, and its arrival online gave scientists easy access to a colleague's oeuvre so they could see whether it was published in good journals. Suddenly, the scientific life had a scoreboard.
The Web of Knowledge now comprises 700 million cited references from 23,000 journals published since 1804. It's used by 20 million researchers in nearly 100 countries. Anyone—scientist, dean, lab director—can sort the entries and tell someone's fortune. Nothing approaches it for breadth and longevity. Though the Journal Impact Factor has competitors, it remains the gold standard. "You may not like the database, but it has not been replaced," Garfield says.
That said, the JIF has problems. Review journals, which round up current research, are generally cited far more often than those that publish new findings. And even though the JIF is meant to rate only journals, most people use it as a proxy for rating individual scientists anyway.
Worse, the system can be gamed. Editors have been known to encourage authors to cite articles from their journal (which has the aroma of extortion—"Help us with our JIF if you want to get published"). Journals that print obituaries, editorials, and letters catch a break, because these articles are included in the JIF numerator but not counted in the denominator. There had to be a better way.
Even change-averse academia admitted that Hirsch had come up with a different mousetrap. "The h-index does seem to be able to identify good scientists, and it is becoming widely used informally," the journal Nature reported in 2007, perhaps somewhat grudgingly. The index makes it harder to cheat. Researchers have to be champion self-citers to move their own numbers, and editors have no reason to influence the system.
On the other hand, Hirsch acknowledges that the h-index has its own intrinsic weaknesses. It's kind to older folks, for example, but not great to younger scientists. If a scientist writes six brilliant papers and dies, his h-index will never be higher than six, even if each paper is cited 10,000 times. And by putting the onus on individuals, it encourages researchers to write about sexy topics and hew close to the conventional wisdom—exactly what Hirsch was trying to avoid. Plus, it has trouble apportioning credit on papers with multiple authors. (Complicated math might sort researchers by their respective contributions ... maybe.)
While the problems of the various citation-based ranking schemes might seem (ahem) academic, their strategies are increasingly the coin of the online realm. Understanding and quantifying reputation is the best approach to navigating the tsunami of information on the Internet. That's why Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin cited Eugene Garfield in their academic work on PageRank, the algorithm that powers their company's search engine. "Articles cited by this article" and "articles that cite this article" are really just outbound and inbound links. Today, citation analysis has come full circle. Eigenfactor and SCImago actually use variations of PageRank to evaluate scientific journals. And the introduction of Google Scholar, a search tool designed specifically for academic research, provided a whole new set of citation data; it can help calculate h-index, as well as a newer ranking system called the g-index that gives more weight to articles with higher citation counts.
The depth of data available on the Internet and the increasing importance of online archives and publications like the ArXiv for physics and the Public Library of Science for biomedicine have made possible new metrics: number of downloads, rate of downloads over time (chronometrics), and even levels of funding and numbers of doctoral students working in a lab (nonbibliometric performance indicators). So powerful are these new kinds of measurements that they're finding applications beyond ranking scientists. One recent article suggested that citation analysis could be used to predict the direction of scientific innovation.
Not even Web flavor-of-the-month Twitter is immune. The microblogging site displays the number of users following a given Twitterer, and the number of users that person follows. So you can see where this is going: Various Web sites track Twitter use, factoring in those numbers as well as "re-tweets," the number of times a person's posts get recapitulated, to come up with ranks for users. The more important any given Web application becomes, the more its users want ranks.
"The Impact Factor was never supposed to be used to rank scientists," says Marie McVeigh, senior manager for bibliographic policy at Thomson Reuters. She's right, of course, but it's too late now. At least the h-index seems to give people the right numbers. Edward Witten, genius cosmologist at the Institute for Advanced Study, scores 120, the highest of all physicists. A Brief History of Time theorist Stephen Hawking gets 67. And Hirsch? He rates a 52, which according to his 2005 paper makes him "outstanding" and "likely to be found only at the top universities or major research laboratories." See? The system works.
Guy Gugliotta (guygugliotta@yahoo.com) wrote about mutated microorganisms in issue 15.09.
: Size seems to matter to the folks at Amazon. While the Kindle 2 has a 6-inch (measured diagonally) e-ink screen — roughly the area of a mass-market paperback book — the DX's 9.7-inch screen resembles a page from a typical hardback. Put another way, the DX flaunts 2.5 times more display space. More text on a page means more lines and, if you prefer, a bigger font, without having to turn the page as often. What does that mean for you? It's easier to read using the DX.
By elegantly super-sizing the Kindle — and ramping up its ability to read files — Amazon has improved the best all-around e-reader available. But the hefty price tag doesn't fit Jeff Bezo's stated philosophy of getting the best value for his customers.
WIRED Big-screen device that's even more readable than the original Kindle. PDF support is a welcome addition.
TIRED High cost of admission. Pivot mode has hair trigger. Southpaws will find the reader cumbersome.
$490, amazon.com
Read our full Amazon.com Kindle DX review.
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: Shaped like a small bar of shower soap, the dense, ebony Pre matches many (if not all) of the features of its chief competitor, the iPhone. But in one key aspect, the Pre does the iPhone one better. While a lot of the Pre's features — a bright 3.1-inch touchscreen manipulated by taps, swipes and pinches; apps sold by third parties in an open online bazaar; integration of e-mail, contacts and calendar — are now standard in 3G smartphones, Palm also lets users keep multiple applications running simultaneously.
Its long-term prospects, though, hinge on whether or not all those third-party apps will show up, whether Sprint can satisfy users, and whether Apple has something up its sleeve that counters the Palm's gambits. Also, of course, the Pre has to prove stable and reliable. (Our test unit occasionally suffered opening-day jitters, including a crash that was fixed only by taking out the removable battery.)
WIRED Great look and superb feel. Well-conceived OS with multitasking and instant notification. Physical keyboard. Utilizes iTunes to load and refresh content.
TIRED Multitasking puts a big suck on the battery. Sprint exclusivity will be annoying to Palm-philes on a contract with AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. Keyboard is puny. If Apple blocks the handset's access to iTunes, Pre users are hosed.
$200 (with two year contract), palm.com
Read our full Palm Pre review.
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: Demonstrating that it's serious about making a run at the top-end offerings from Canon and Nikon, the K-7 bows with a spankin' new 14.6 megapixel, 28.1mm (diagonal) CMOS image sensor and an updated Prime II processor. This enables HD-video capture, built-in high dynamic range shooting, a 77-segment metering system, pre- and post-production filtering and distortion correction, all in a form factor more than 10 percent smaller (and actually easier to handle) than its predecessor, the K20D.
By and large, it's a super quick focusing compact image-maker — once you learn how the menu system works. But it's just a step or two behind Nikon and Canon in ease of use. In spite of that, Pentax has nearly hit a home run with the K-7. It's svelte, sturdy, fairly easy to operate, has a great range of available lenses and a feature set that's unmatched at this price. Think of it as a solid double off the wall, with an RBI.
WIRED Speedy 5.2 frames per second. Super-sturdy construction. Lots of pro features at a prosumer price. Improved battery life and 100 percent field-of-view viewfinder. Faster, more robust processor. Live View with contrast focus and face detection. Shoots 5.2 frames-per-second with shutter speed up to 1/8000. The 77-segment metering system and 11-point AF system are quick and spot on. Internal mechanical shake reduction.
TIRED User interface needs to be simpler and more unified.
$1,300 (body only), pentax.com
Read our full Pentax K-7 DSLR review.
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: The A600's 21.5-inch screen (1920 x 1080 pixels) is big and dazzlingly bright — so much so that Lenovo includes an automatic screen-dimming system designed to prevent eyestrain. Inside its bowels, this 25-pounder offers substantial specs: 2.13-GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and a terabyte hard drive. The ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics card may be getting a little long in the tooth, but it's powerful enough to make the A600 more than acceptable to play all but the very latest gaming titles.
That's a lot of stuff for the price — $1,150 — and stripped-down versions of the IdeaCentre run considerably less. If you don't need the power but dig the design and screen size, the budget rendition might be an even better bet.
WIRED Very small footprint. Single-cable design is a blessing for technophobes. Swivel base makes adjustments to viewing angle easy. Six USB ports and 802.11n Wi-Fi, plus FireWire, SD and coaxial connectors.
TIRED Keyboard and mouse frequently fall asleep; difficult to awaken. Remote control overly complex and rather homely. Included games feel like an engineer on Quaaludes designed them.
$1,150 (as tested), lenovo.com
Read our full Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 review.
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: Its glossy black finish and polished Darth Vader design makes Samsung's newest Blu-ray box, the BD-P4600, stand out from every other player on the market. Well, it actually doesn't stand anywhere at all -- it comes with the metal brackets to mount it on a wall or plant it on a desktop pedestal. And like Lord Vader, this model packs some serious force with its built-in streaming for Pandora music and Netflix.
For $100 less, you could pick up Samsung's BD-P3600 a player that has all the same features as this model but comes in a non-wall-mountable chassis. But really, would you want to watch The Empire Strikes Back on a Blu-ray player that didn't look like it was made in a dark corner of Coruscant?
WIRED High-end, spacey designed Blu-ray player is loaded with features include ability to wall mount, loads Blu-ray discs exceptional fast and offers exceptional playback.
TIRED Complicated initial setup for its feature set. Cramped underside port-connection compartment. Competitively over priced for what it delivers.
$500, samsung.com
Read our full Samsung BD-P4600 review.
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: Let's cut to the chase and hit you with the sell: The MSI X340 is a MacBook Air at half the price. Interested? Read on.
For starters, the X340 (aka the X Slim) is considerably better muscled than your typical netbook, featuring a glossy 13.4-inch (1366 x 768 pixels) screen, 320-GB hard drive and 2 GB of RAM. Like Apple's ultralight, it's incredibly thin — about 0.8 inches at its thickest — and it actually weighs slightly less than the Air, just 2.9 pounds.
Before you start salivating over the prospects of a half-price Air, note that Apple's laptop does trump the X340 in a few significant ways. The Air includes Nvidia graphics, while the X340 is stuck with Intel's integrated chipset.
The screens are night and day: The Air is renowned for having one of the brightest LCDs available, while the X340 is merely average in this department.
WIRED Gorgeous design; slap an Apple sticker over the MSI logo and no one will ever know. Performance bests most netbooks, though it's hardly top-notch. Surprisingly good graphics and responsiveness. Includes the usual goodies: 1.3-MP webcam, Bluetooth, 802.11n.
TIRED Flaky touchpad. Disappointing battery life.
$900 (as tested), us.msi.com
Read our full MSI X340 review.
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: The first day we took the car for a spin we kept the front-mounted 5.9-liter 470 BHP vehicle on a strict diet of city driving: no freeways, no tightly coiled back roads. Trudging through heavy traffic almost felt sadistic — kind of like taking a thoroughbred racehorse and giving it polio. But after exiting the city limits and tearing down a stretch of asphalt connecting San Francisco with Napa Valley, the DB9 snapped up, greedily devouring 90-degree curves with just a hint of oversteer.
WIRED Fast like a sports car, more refined than a quart of 40-weight. Gorgeous; induces whiplash in head-turning bystanders. Zippy acceleration for a GT — you can't front on a 4.6-second zero-to-60 time ... unless you're armed with a Ferrari or a Bentley.
TIRED Hood-release switch located in impossibly hard to find/reach nook (as if an Aston owner would ever do that). iPod access tres difficult to set up. Chugs gas like an ASU freshman rips beer-bong hits. Back seat harder to get into than MIT.
$209,000 as tested, astonmartin.com
Read our full Aston Martin DB9 review.
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: If you don't mind looking like an extra in a 1-800-Dentist commercial and have no reservations about looking like a crazy person yammering to yourself, the Plantronics Voyager Pro may be the perfect Bluetooth headset for you.
This headset is big, bulky and (surprise, surprise) silly looking. The 3-inch boom extending out toward your mouth is the main culprit of these crimes against style. But despite being tacky, the Voyager Pro delivers strong performance. It's easy to use, withstands drops, bumps and haphazardly tossed laptops, has decent battery life and pairs effortlessly with a range of smartphones, including the iPhone.
WIRED Easy to use. Super sound quality. Stays attached to your ear. You will look like a telephone operator from the '50s.
TIRED You will look like a telephone operator from the '50s.
$100, plantronics.com
Read our full Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth Headset review.
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: After a few grim years ceded to the iMac, PC-based all-in-one desktops are making an LL Cool J-esque comeback. Their next move: Make the switch from semi-luxe gear designed for highly aesthetic environments to the megacheap world that the netbook has built.
Specs look exceedingly promising at first: 250 GB of hard drive space, 2 GB of RAM, integrated Wi-Fi, DVD burner, an SD card slot and a very bright 19-inch touchscreen display. If nothing else, it's one of the best-looking touchscreens (non-capacitive; a stylus works better than your finger) we've seen at this screen size.
But the Achilles' heel of the Wind Top is its baffling choice of an Atom 330 processor to power these guts. Although the dual-core 330 is known as the "fast" version of the Atom (it draws 8 watts instead of the 2.5 watts used by the netbook standard Atom N270 and has double the L2 cache), it's still woefully inadequate for a computer this ambitious.
WIRED Amazingly affordable and loaded to the gills. Touchscreen makes this a perfect kiddie computer. Slim profile lets it fit just about anywhere. Cuter than a box of puppies.
TIRED Performance problems dog the user at every turn. Flashing blue hard-drive activity light is front and center, terribly distracting and impossible to cover up. Bundled keyboard and mouse are beyond cheap. Webcam aim can't be adjusted.
$590 (as tested), us.msi.com
Read our full MSI Wind Top AE1900 review.
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: The new Chrome Soyuz is an ambitious (if slightly crazed) reimagining of the urban commuter backpack. It's a weird hybrid of a river-rafting drybag and laptop case, all contained within a stylish wedge of black and red nylon.
It sits comfortably behind your back, letting you weave through traffic on your fixie without fear of snagging on the projecting mirrors of double-parked delivery trucks. It can ride between your knees on a crowded train. And it tucks neatly below an airplane seat, leaving just enough space on either side to squeeze in your feet so you can stretch your legs.
WIRED Wedge design keeps load balanced, trim and compact. Expandable waterproof compartment shrinks down to nothing when empty. Heavy-duty 1,000-denier cordura nylon withstands abuse. Main compartments are completely waterproof. Heavy-duty metal strap locks make adjustment easy. Glorious enameled metal "Chrome" logo.
TIRED Narrow openings + deep compartments = where the hell did my keys go? Not quite big enough to contain a six-pack (unless you put the bottles in one by one). Padding traps heat, steaming your back on long rides. No hip belt. Pricier than a metric ton of pig iron.
$180, chromebags.com
Read our full Chrome Soyuz Backpack review.
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: The pristine fidelity these headphones deliver is the result of a dual-armature layout, which bathes your tympanic membranes in accurate audio reproduction. The earpiece's dual drivers have the added benefit of propping up the typically flaccid base that seems to plague many other in-ear monitors.
The only major downside is that great sound comes at a considerable price — $230 to be precise. For most people, that's likely to be as much (or more) than you spent on your MP3 player. But as my neglected Audio Technicas can attest, in this case, you undoubtedly get what you pay for.
WIRED Exquisite sound reproduction in an insanely small package. Handy in-flight attenuator saves you from Captain Blowhard's eardrum-exploding announcements. Fuller, richer base and wider frequency response than previous UEs.
TIRED Spendiferous. Cable noise will distract joggers or anyone planning to use the headphones while exercising. Despite its redesign, the pocket case is still too small to fit all the accouterments.
$230, ultimateears.com
Read our full Ultimate Ears 700 Noise-Isolating Earphones review.
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: Digeo's Moxi HD DVR sports a slick, Emmy-winning (seriously) user interface and all the commercial-skipping accouterments of competitors like TiVo. It even ditches a monthly bill in favor of flat pricing and grants access to online video and music.
The Moxi's stunning high-def UI is full of slick transitions and responsive performance. Unfortunately, sleek visuals don't conquer all. Basics like surfing through the program guide (or accessing a previously recorded show) took a lot of hunting and pecking through a menu tree. Finding pre-recorded shows and getting them to play took searching, highlighting, selecting Play, confirming that you selected Play, and then finally watching.
WIRED No monthly bills. Sleek high-def interface has nifty animations and transitions. Hard drive expandable to 1 TB for power recorders. Dual tuners let you watch one show while recording another. Offers a whopping 1.5-hour buffer time per HD channel.
TIRED Hefty entry fee. Online video chops not quite up to snuff. No dedicated Guide button on the remote?! Unnecessarily complicated menus. Programming schedules are displayed in cramped vertical list instead of friendly grid.
$800, moxi.com
Read our full Digeo Moxi HD DVR review.
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: We're a little dismayed by the E71x. The device is almost identical to the E71: same 3.2-megapixel camera, same .04-inch profile, same vibrant 320 x 240 QVGA display, same business apps and multimedia functionality. The operating system is slightly tweaked so there are some differences in transmissions and page loading. But as a whole, the phone is relatively unchanged.
These are the key differences: a new $100 price tag (good), a black paint job (badass) and the omission of our favorite feature from the original E71 (ugly). We're talking about the two separate, customizable home screens, something we absolutely loved about the O.G. E71. One screen was designed for business, the other for personal use. It was a great function: You could literally edit spreadsheets from 9 to 5 on one screen, then toggle over to the other and watch a couple of episodes of 30 Rock on the media player.
WIRED Windows interface means you don't have to learn a new menu convention to browse your old files. Dumping the data of only one (or all) of your multiple PCs takes less than five mouse clicks. You can set up a password in the toolbar.
TIRED Dock and multi-PC backup capability only provided with 500-GB version. Full hard-drive recovery requires booting from a CD. Windows-only means it fails to bridge the gap in inter-OSial households.
$100 with 2-year contract, att.com
Read our full Nokia E71x Smartphone review.
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: The Replica comes with bare-bones software and strikes a good balance between peace of mind and individual-user control.
After the hard drive is plugged in, the Replica starts mirroring your computer's content. The startup process is short, taking only a couple of minutes, though the actual backup is a time-gobbling endeavor. (It took us about four hours to transfer 130 GB of data). A blue light on the top of the Replica's case blinks continuously while data is being transferred. It's also stealthy for a hard drive, emitting only a quiet whir when working at full speed.
WIRED Windows interface means you don't have to learn a new menu convention to browse your old files. Dumping the data of only one (or all) of your multiple PCs takes less than five mouse clicks. You can set up a password in the toolbar.
TIRED Dock and multi-PC backup capability only provided with 500-GB version. Full hard-drive recovery requires booting from a CD. Windows-only means it fails to bridge the gap in inter-OSial households.
$200, seagate.com
Read our full Seagate Replica 500GB review.
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: Panasonic's new HDC-TM300 shoots in "Full HD," marketing speak for 1080p — aka 1080 x 1920 resolution with progressive-scan video. Translation? Stunning Blu-ray-level video that should more than lives up to the most critical expectations of prosumers and video enthusiasts.
The highlight of this shooter is the high-def footage. Not only does the phenomenal zoom reel in distant objects, but thanks to the triple sensors and quality lens, it nails far-off details perfectly. The architectural features of distant buildings we shot in downtown San Francisco showed up like we were standing on the window ledge -- not in a park three blocks away.
WIREDReproduces colors like a Crayola factory. Closeups pop with sharp, clear details. Nice performance in low light. Einstein-smart automatic shooting features are like having your own DP built into the camera. 32-GB onboard memory is expandable via SDHC slot. Great zoom tackles action better than Jason Statham.
TIRED Fast pans in bright daylight turns up more artifacts than a Mayan ruin. May require second mortgage.
$1,300, Panasonic.com
Read our full Panasonic HDC-TM300 HD Camcorder review.
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: In the aftermath (heh heh) of the bass-heavy Beats by Dre Studio headphones, Monster decided to pack the Doctor's finicky sound quality specs into two tiny earbuds. Naturally, audiophiles (including myself) were skeptical. Sure the Beats suffered from shoddy construction and fell apart after a few months of ownership, but they also provided some of the best bass we've ever heard in a set of cans.
Sure enough, the bass response from these things is rich and full. The lowest frequencies rumble with a force akin to the thud of a decent subwoofer. Keep in mind these are not miniaturized 12-inch Kickers designed to blow your eardrums out. But for a device that is essentially a tiny speaker with no auxiliary power, they're superb — especially when compared to the white earcruds doled out by Apple with every iDevice.
WIRED Excellent all-around frequency definition and particularly impressive bass response. Monster’s durable, ingenious anti-tangle cable means jumbled cords are a distant unpleasant memory.
TIRED The bright red cable is slightly ostentatious. Peak bass only hits at earwax shattering volumes.
$150, beatsbydre.com
Read our full Monster Beats By Dre Tour High-Resolution In-Ear Headphones review.
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: The UE-11 Pros are packed with four, count 'em, four drivers: There's a double dose of bass, one for the midrange and one chiming the highs. If you're looking for the most precise, separated sound possible, then this is the earphone for you. Throughout the play list I heard clarity and detail in the music I'd never heard before. This rang especially true with classical tunes — it literally feels like sitting in a symphony hall and having every instrument speak directly to you. To get that kind of superior fidelity you'll certainly have to pay the piper. But you'll really love the music while Rome — or your bank account — burns.
WIRED Most clear, separated and detailed sound.
TIRED Try convincing your spouse you need a $1,150 set of headphones.
$1,150, ultimateears.com
Read our full UE-11 Pro review.
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: The slate-gray, high-impact polymer body houses three LEDs capable of blasting out a peak 270 lumens for 15 minutes, or a more useful and long-lasting 90 lumens for 60 minutes. Both settings have an emergency low-power 25-lumen mode (equivalent in brightness to most common household D-cell flashlights) for an additional 60 minutes.
WIRED High-power pro flashlight pumps out awesome illumination and recharges ridiculously fast. Flashlight will outlive you. Seriously brilliant, blinding — a boon for flashlight junkies.
TIRED Pricy front-end investment. Comes with a 12-volt car charger.
$170, 511tactical.com
Read our full 5.11 Tactical Light review.
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: In our tests, we threw all things digital at this 68-pound slab. And while it does not perform as superbly as its higher-price brethren from Sony, Samsung and Sharp, it still shows off a completely acceptable high-def image and above-average sound.
So where has Westinghouse cut corners? Oh, let's see. How about the borderline embarrassing 1000:1 contrast ratio? In a well-lit room, the screen looks more washed out than a warehouse full of Maytags. And even though the set offers the 120-Hz spec, fast motion still looks a bit blurred.
WIRED High resolution and decent sound at incredible rock-bottom price. Convenience features integrated into menu. Quality remote not found in higher-priced TVs.
TIRED Displays some pixelated speckled noise in darker and mid-hue images. Analog-station reproduction is downright blurry. No worries though — analog TV has flatlined.
$700, Westinghouse.com
Read our full Westinghouse TX-42F450S review.
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: It's not quite a netbook, not quite an ultralight PC. Whatever it is, Samsung's NC20 is a dazzling feat of engineering: an extremely usable 12-inch laptop with epic battery life, impressive specs and a downright mystifyingly affordable price tag.
But the NC20 doesn't make depressing tradeoffs to achieve those scores. Battery life is three hours, 40 minutes (22 percent longer than the S10) and weight is just 3.3 pounds, comparable to the Asus Eee PC 1000H. All that and you get a 12.1-inch LCD, too, instead of the usual 10.2-inch netbook display.
WIRED Everything a netbook should be: Offers the best performance available from a computer this portable and inexpensive. Very usable keyboard. Good quality audio. Includes three USB ports, 1.3-megapixel webcam, and SD card slot.
TIRED LCD could be a touch brighter and quality sharper. Chassis design is a bit boring.
$550, samsung.com
Read our full Samsung NC 20 review.
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: Pure Digital's Flip has proven that it's possible to build a super-small flash memory camcorder and offer it up for fewer than two hundred bucks. But there are tradeoffs with going small and cheap, like optics and battery life. Canon takes a completely different tack with its newest solid-state cam, the Vixia HF S10, which delivers some fantastically brilliant moving pictures, but at a stiff cost.
Out in the field, auto focus and auto exposure were both very impressive in a wide range of situations, from the intense brightness of the beach to shady and contrasty venues. Every camera suffers indoors, thanks to low light, and everyone complains about it, but the S10 did a credible job with low-light shots and it's clearly better than previous cams of this ilk.
WIRED Improved audio quality. Big, bright lens. Speedy processor. Lots of creative control options. More intuitive menus than previous generation Canon camcorders.
TIRED Loose lens cover noisier than cutlery caught in a garbage disposal. Still images come off looking a bit overexposed.
$1,300, canon.com
Read our full Canon Vixia HF S10 review.
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: Dry your eyes, plasma junkies. The untimely demise of Pioneer's Kuro line doesn't mean you'll have to forgo those deliciously deep blacks and theater-perfect colors for long. In fact, even as the last of the Pioneer Kuro Elites make its way into a few lucky U.S. homes, a new lineup of HDTV sets are already poised to seize the plasma king's vacant throne.
Key to this plasma's visual appeal is its integrated THX mode. In addition to blessing various audio components, the home-theater ninjas at THX began bestowing plasma and LCD certification a few years back. Each set is subjected to approximately 400 individual tests, ranging from evaluations in signal processing to luminosity. Basically, the idea behind G10's THX mode is to recreate the precise color gamut filmmakers use during the in-studio post-production process.
WIRED Mind-boggling blacks with tons of detail. THX mode is a godsend for movie buffs. Integrated SD card slots transform your plasma into a giant digital photo frame. Amazing color saturation.
TIRED THX mode is bit dim for brightly lit rooms. Ethernet connectivity is nice for VieraCast, but Wi-Fi would've been better. Three HDMI ports (two in the back, one on the side) don't cut it. More power-hungry than LCD TVs. Where's the PiP?
$1,300, panasonic.com
Read our full Panasonic TC-P42G10 Viera G10 Series Plasma review.
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: The PogoPlug is a device, which looks like a supersized AC adapter, plugs into almost any external hard drive (even a USB stick) and then pumps that content onto the web, giving you access anywhere in the world you can get an internet signal — including your iPhone.
But the PogoPlug isn't without the occasional snafu and annoyances. Only image files are available for preview. PDF, Word documents or even HTML files have to be downloaded before viewing. Worse yet, when we unhooked the device, it caused our PC to crash twice in a row. We're still not entirely sure if this was due to a glitch in the PogoPlug or in Windows.
WIRED Easy to use. Simple setup. Great utility: I must be able to access my collection of LOLcat photos from anywhere. The iPhone app is solid software.
TIRED No wireless mode ... yet. Poor security — it's a wise idea to keep those tax returns or bank documents off the PogoPlug. Computer crashes are deeply flummoxing. The iPhone is currently the only mobile device that supports remote access.
$100, pogoplug.com
Read our full Cloud Engines PogoPlug review.
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: NatureMill's Pro edition is an indoor composter we can pretty much dig. Using minimal electricity, a small motor turns a heavy-duty mixing bar, heats the mixing chamber (no sunlight needed) and powers an air pump that works with a carbon air filter to help reduce smell (each filter lasts four to five years).
Just add starter dirt, drop in some sawdust pellets to combat odors and dump your food scraps in. NatureMill recommends that you cut organic material into 4-inch bits before plopping it in. We didn't, but aside from the motor making some gnarly noises, it didn't seem to affect compost production. NatureMill's Pro version also features some automatic activation. We were able to leave ours sitting for weeks without pushing the button even once; it mixed and heated itself just fine.
WIRED Stainless steel mixing bar made short work of uncut banana peels. Relatively small and exceptionally lightweight = easy to stash and transport. Foot pedal eliminates lid touching. Mighty Morphin' Power Saver: only draws 5 kwh a month (roughly 50 cents on an average electric bill). Not as much of an eyesore as it could be and it's available in a range of colors (including, you guess it, green).
TIRED Little to no stench — until top opens (that's hard to remedy, and burger/fish/salad remnants smell worse than a dead wildebeest doused in Eau D'Bile). Polypropylene housing is light, but may not last forever. Disposable carbon filters reduce smell, but also cut down on the green factor. Regular maintenance (scraping the mix chamber walls) isn't fun.
$400, naturemill.com
Read our full Nature Mill Indoor Composter — Pro Edition review.
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: You can get away with a lot if you're beautiful. Such is the case with the new Porsche Design P'9522 phone. In some ways, it's a wonderful and capable cellphone, but in most others, it's dumber than the gorgeous block of aluminum it was machined from.
Someone forgot to include e-mail — an absence that had us trying to mar the Porsche phone's scratchproof screen with claws of rage. Unfortunately, that screen is tough, so the P'9522 will be lauded and drooled over — despite our many gripes with it.
WIRED Gorgeous. Touchscreen interface is easy to understand, if limited and frustrating. Preloaded ringtones include the roaring engines of the 911 GT3 and Turbo. Its 5-megapixel camera has autofocus and captures clean, vivid images. LED flash doubles as a flashlight. Unlocking the phone with its fingerprint scanner is very MI5.
TIRED Fingerprint scanner is also very POS: Who thought it would be a good idea to use fingerprints to access a device you're likely holding in one hand while juggling multiple other tasks? Preloaded ringtones include bad German techno. Touchscreen is deeply frustrating. Seriously — no e-mail?
$800, porschedesign.com
Read our full Porsche Design P'9522 Phone review.
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: Weighing just 140 grams, the handset offers some of the best optics we've ever found crammed into a cell phone: sharp, noiseless pics (3,264 × 2,448 pixels) and decent image stabilizer punctuate video capture that puts full-figured handicams from 2008 to shame. You can even shoot VGA at 30 fps or QVGA at a whopping 120 fps (yes, 120!), including slow motion footage in 1/4 and 1/8 speeds.
Amazing, sure, but not a picture perfect phone. The i8510 functions almost exactly like a standard point-and-shoot, except for the zoom button, which is placed inexplicably, and awkwardly at the bottom of the device.
WIRED Beaucoup codecs, including — wait for it — DivX! 2.8-inch screen excellent for playback. Intuitive photo/video editing suite. Equally intuitive navigation. Automatic lens cover. MicroSD slot good for 16 GB (enough for aspiring Scorseses to go epic). All the usual smartphone suspects: 3G, Wi-Fi, USB, Bluetooth, accelerometer, GPS. Decent earbuds with ample cord. 3.5mm audio jack. Most excellent: TV-out capability.
TIRED Side-mounted headphone jack makes phone harder to pocket. Optical control pad is a tad sensitive (between us and you — we don't want to hurt its feelings). Most bogus: Metal shell retains enough scratches to fill a DJ Shadow album. A little on the clunky side. Most bogus: Flash needs to be brighter.
$500, samsung.com
Read our full Samsung i8510 INNOV8 review.
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: As the successor to Logitech's G11 and G15, this huge hunk of plastic comes with gaming hardwired in its DNA. Like its relatives, it has a blocky aesthetic that harkens to the days of the Model M. There are, however, a handful of very modern flourishes that make this latest G-board a distinctly modern marvel.
In the end, the G19's main drawback is the same one that has plagued fancy keyboards since the days of yore: It's freaking huge. That swiveling LCD? It actually requires a tiny onboard Linux computer to run, which in turn requires its own power source. Should you choose to make use of the two self-powered USB ports, you'll potentially have more wires shooting out of this thing than your computer.
WIRED More customizable than a box of Legos. Two self-powered USB ports. Dedicated D-pad and menu keys let you control LCD directly from the keyboard. Convenient cable management lanes carved into bottom of unit lessens clutter … slightly. Choose-your-own-color adventure with adjustable backlighting. Keys are pleasantly clicky and responsive.
TIRED Limited desktop space? This is not your keyboard. Price tag to match gargantuan footprint. Requires power brick to run. After its novelty wears off, built-in LCD becomes more of a distraction than a useful tool.
$200, Logitech.com
Read our full Logitech G19 Keyboard review.
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: Want to catch the last episode of Battlestar Galactica while hanging out in the local java joint? Going to download a season of The Simpsons for viewing on the plane? Giving an impromptu screening of your vacation photos at a friend's house? The Mini 10 is your machine.
But there are infuriating shortcomings to the Mini 10. The trackpad is one of the worst we've seen. Dell's decision to integrate the buttons underneath the pad itself makes using it both unpredictable and challenging. When you click on a button, the cursor may hit the target, wiggle off a centimeter or two, or teleport off into a remote corner of your screen. While it got easier to use after a week of practice, our advice is to invest in a cheap travel mouse.
WIRED Bright, responsive screen. Integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam. Not gunked up with crapware. HDMI-out port shows charming, if unwarranted, optimism about the netbook's video capabilities. Light weight: Just 2.6 pounds.
TIRED Infuriating trackpad with integrated buttons hidden underneath. Excessively glossy screen produces distracting glare. Windows XP is starting to look pretty tired. What, no solid-state option? Despite the HDMI port, the netbook can't deliver HD video without fits and starts.
$470 (as tested), dell.com
Read our full Dell Mini 10 Netbook review.
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: The new 370Z upgrades come in the form of a sexy body with a hood, hatch and doors of lightweight aluminum and a chassis significantly stiffer to reduce performance-robbing flex. To make up for the beefier chassis, Nissan's engineers pared more than 225 pounds from the rest of the car — even the audio system lost 3.5 pounds — and the result is a car that weighs 88 pounds less than the previous 350Z.
Every model gets the same 332-horsepower V6, an engine that makes this Z the quickest yet with a zero-to-60 time of 4.6 seconds. That kind of performance, however, is contingent on your skills as a driver. If you don't posses Lewis Hamilton levels of talent don't fret. The Z's abundant power and excellent handling will let you think you do.
WIRED Insanely easy to drive, insanely quickly. You'll run out of nerve before you run out of grip. Rev-matching transmission makes heel-toe shifting more obsolete than a gramophone.
TIRED Rev-matching transmission makes heel-toe shifting more obsolete than a vinyl record. Tympani-like tire roar, piccolo-like exhaust note. Hummer-sized blind spots make lane changes a gun-it-and-go-for-it leap of faith. Fake brushed-aluminum interior bits don't fool anyone.
$33,970 (as tested), nissanusa.com
Read our full Nissan 2009 370Z review.
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: Using the BookReader is simple: Just plunk a novel on the platen, punch a button and you're relaxing to the dulcet sounds of Jill, a computerized voice with a voracious appetite for literature. All the menus read themselves off when you mouse over them, and they have keyboard shortcuts, which is useful if you have reduced vision. Jill is pretty good at recognizing words. We tried out several books, including one heavy with medical jargon, and she held her own with just a few exceptions.
Useful as it is, we could not help noticing that the BookReader seems to be slightly undercooked. A few of the buttons don't really do anything, and you can't customize the dictionary to alter Jill's interpretation of commonly used, but horribly flubbed words, acronyms or numbers. The unit seems to be terribly overpriced as well. Plustek wants $600 for the BookReader, despite the fact that the OpticBook only costs $250 — and has its own text-to-speech function.
WIRED Reads books to you at the push of a button. Platen glass goes right to the edge to accommodate books without strain. Turns text into MP3s for portability. Includes several accessibility features to help the visually impaired.
TIRED The included software lacks polish and seems rushed. Squat, ugly looks make it seem at home in a cubicle farm. The reader voice may not screw up often, but when it does, it's a doozy. High price nears gouging territory.
$600, plustek.com
Read our full Plustek BookReader V100 review.
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: Photo: Dylan Tweeny/Wired.comApple's newest Shuffle (almost 50 percent smaller than previous Shuffles) could easily be mistaken for a stick of Trident, features no buttons, and pimps voice-identification technology. But even given its apparent readily consumable stature, there are a few features on the Shuffle that are a bit tough to swallow.
The biggest gripe on the 4-GB Shuffle we tested is definitely the control set. First off, it's completely counterintuitive; Apple says you can easily use it without looking. We still don't have the hang of it after a few days of testing. What's worse, if you have a decent set of earbuds (say, a pair of Shures or Ultimate Ears) you're totally hosed — you'll have to endure the 'buds that come with the Shuffle or pick up specially made third-party headphones. Our recommendation? Pick up a new Shuffle only if you're prepared to deal with proprietary headphones and ambiguous controls.
WIRED Thumb-drive size. Can double as a tie clip. Battery life lasts for 12 freaking hours. Short USB sync cord is sexy. Yes, we'll admit, it's another beautifully designed piece of hardware from Apple. Battery bonked out after 11 constant hours of blasting Thunderstruck on loop.
TIRED Proprietary headphones required. Control set awkward to use, hard to get used to. So small, it nearly gets lost in the packaging it comes in.
$80, apple.com
Read our full Apple iPod Shuffle 3rd Gen review.
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: Rather than foam, gel or compressed-air cushioning, the soles on Newtons have a series of "actuator lugs" just below the ball of the foot. The lugs are designed to help encourage you to land on your forefoot, to protect that part of the foot, and (best yet) to propel you forward. When you land, the lugs push into hollow chambers in the midsole. This cushions your landing, and helps make it comfy to land midsole or forefoot rather than on the heel as you might be accustomed. As your foot moves forward, these lugs then essentially lever out, and as you lift your foot, they return the energy by pushing up and out in the same direction as your stride. Newton claims this makes them more efficient than traditional foam or gel soles that simply absorb energy but don't return it.
WIRED So cozy they're like a Snuggie for your feet. Actuator lugs get you off your heels better than a La-Z-Boy. Lightweight at 10.2 ounces. Designed for all stride types. Stomps cold weather like global warming, and keeps out the drizzle for shizzle.
TIRED Not waterproof. Worse on single-track trails than a skateboard. $175??? OMG, for that much money I could just pay somebody to run for me.
$175, newtonrunning.com
Read our full Newton All Weather Trainer review.
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: The Firebird features a hybrid design — using 2.5-inch hard drives (two 320-GB models) and dual graphics cards originally designed for laptops — but powers it all with a desktop CPU and desktop-sized DIMMs. As with a laptop, wireless is built in, but the power supply is not: To save on wattage, HP breaks out the (enormous) power adapter instead of integrating it into the box.
As cool as the Firebird is on the whole, it isn't without some foibles. The inclusion of an ExpressCard slot is on the baffling-to-useless side, and the external power supply (it's huge) is more annoying to deal with than it sounds. But our biggest gripe is that the Firebird's streamlined shell means it includes no front-mounted ports at all, not even a single USB slot for your thumb drive. Seriously HP, even the Mac Pro finds room for that.
WIRED Amazingly quiet and conscientious in its power consumption. Outstanding design; belongs on top of the desk, not beneath it. Solid all-around performance at a fair price.
TIRED No front USB port. Curvy design means you can't put anything on top of the case. Functionally locked down, with no real upgrade path.
$2,100 (as tested), hp.com
Read our full HP Firebird 803 review.
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: I shouldn't love this truck. I should hate it. I purposely do not own a car, and this all-black behemoth represents everything I hate about SUV culture: conspicuous consumption, insensitivity to our rapidly shrinking world and crowded cities, middle finger raised at global warming.
You could slap a cold fusion generator under Big Poppa Cadillac's hood and the first two issues would still apply, but I was kind of wrong about that last one. Have you ever seen Godzilla vs. Megalon? Where Godzilla fights on behalf of the people of Japan against a giant rhinoceros/cockroach? Sure, Tokyo's favorite monster still smashes a bunch of buildings and steps on some people, but he's trying to be good. Same goes for this Hybrid Chromedaddy.
WIRED Decent pickup for a motorized bomb shelter. Combined ABS and regenerative braking system do a terrific job of hauling the beast down from speed. Trick motorized step makes it easy for shorties to climb into your rolling condo.
TIRED Thing has a car phone. No, not Bluetooth, but an actual phone built into infotainment system. (It's actually just Onstar, but there was no other option for hands-free calling.) What is this, 1989? Cadillac — God love 'em — uses the fact that this is a hybrid as an excuse to bling up the truck even more: Hybrid badges are plastered on every hard surface, on the sides of the door, even the windshield. —Joe Brown
$74,085 (as tested), Cadillac.com
Read our full Cadillac Escalade Hybrid review.
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: The Kindle 2 is zippier, with pages turning 20 percent faster (yes, you can tell the difference). It has more memory (2 gigabytes, enough for storing more than 1,500 books onboard). And it flaunts a more powerful built-in battery: Amazon claims that the Kindle lasts four to five days with the wireless on (we got 4.5 days in our first test) and up to two weeks with it off. After a week of limited wireless, my meter is around 50 percent. Amazon also says that after 500 charges, it will hold 80 percent of its original juice. That means that most users won't have to replace the battery (a $60 procedure) for about a decade or so.
Looking over the horizon, it's clear that Amazon's biggest competitor in selling digital books will be Google, whose recent agreement with publishers and authors will make it the virtually exclusive seller for millions of books in copyright but not in print. But right now at least, the Google and Amazon formats aren't compatible: I was unsuccessful in getting a PDF of a public-domain book downloaded from Google to appear in readable form on my Kindle.
WIRED The best e-reading system on the market. Welcome improvements to aesthetics, more functional industrial design, better graphics and longer battery life. Sleeker than the original: One-third of an inch thick and 10 ounces.
TIRED Quite expensive. Book content shackled with DRM. Interface is improved, sure, but it could be even better.
$360, amazon.com
Read our full Amazon.com Kindle 2 review.
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: The iWOW adapter from SRS Labs promises to coax more "immersive" sound from your iPod, and it actually delivers — provided you're listening to the right kind of music. Setup is easy: Snap on the slick little 1-inch extension, plug in some spendy headphones, press a button, and you do indeed get a fuller sound with more depth — especially if you enjoy songs like Sting's "Fragile," a track hand-picked by SRS to highlight the effect.
But when iWOW was applied to songs that were heavy on low-end thump or had multilayered sound (Exhibit A: Beck's "Cold Brains") the iWOW performed more like iMeh. At top volume, bass beats splintered, while at lower volumes tracks sounded muddled and crowded. SRS claims the device "dynamically locates and restores audio detail" and creates a more natural sound. We're not buying it — most of the audio we threw at the iWOW was punctuated with a subtle hiss and fuzzy bass.
WIRED Relatively small adapter. Snaps easily onto your iPod and lends some oomph to certain tunes.
TIRED The effect is nearly lost when using ear buds, the device won't work with older generation iPods, and music that already has a fair share of bass sounds muffled.
$70, srslabs.com
Read our full SRS Labs iWOW Adapter for iPod review.
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:
Leaps ahead of other cam phones, the Memoir's not limited to the 8 megapixels it captures. In shooting mode, the touchscreen has shutterbug controls — zoom, brightness, timer and flash — that float around the image. And just hitting the shutter will take you into camera mode. The Memoir includes a 1-GB microSD to augment the phone's 100 MB of storage (and it's an easy-access slot, rather than hidden under the battery).
But for all its convenience, the Memoir simply isn't a competitor for even the lowliest of dedicated cameras. First off, it's pokey: slow to focus, slow to snap and very touchy when it comes to movement. And though it touts a 16x digital zoom, it has no optical-zooming option.
WIRED Cool touchscreen and accelerometer helps you shoot or view pictures. Compact, pocket-friendly shape, even for hipsters in painted-on jeans.
TIRED Vampiric light sensitivity makes for washed-out shots. Slow to focus, shoot and recover. E-mail functions are even slower. The screen is hard to see in sunlight. Lens cover doesn't close all the time, so the lens can get dusty.
$300 (with 2-year contract), t-mobile.com
Read our full Samsung Memoir.
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: From the outside, the 1000HE doesn't look much different from other netbooks. But it's the machine's heart — the brand new 1.66-GHz Atom N280 processor — that makes it faster, stronger, smarter than its opponents.
Intel claims the silicon slab boosts computing power across the board, especially HD video playback — something that has been woefully horrid in past machines using Atom processors. It's not lying. This is the fastest netbook we've tested (by about 7 percent) in our benchmarks. And HD video playback was noticeably smoother and devoid of chop.
WIRED The first netbook to feature the new Atom N280 chip. MMC and SD media reader slots. Attractive, pearly finish. Decent 1.3-megapixel webcam.
TIRED At 3.1 pounds, it's one of the heaviest puppies in the netbook litter. Lame keyboard.
$400 as tested, asus.com
Read our full Asus Eee PC 1000HE review.
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: The R50 is remarkably easy to set up and use. As you program each component into the remote using the setup wizard, you test a few controls to make sure it has the right code. The remote instantly recognized all our components, and it took us about 10 minutes to get the AV rig up and running. As part of the setup, you name each component, which then appears as an icon on the screen: in my case, a Sony HDTV, Yamaha amp/receiver, Squeezebox, Oppo DVD player and Soundmatters speaker.
WIRED Cool, reddish backlight perfect for nighttime navigation. No computer or web connection needed for operation. No charging cradle required.
TIRED No user manual means gizmo novices might get lost in setup. $150 price point isn't super pricey, but then it's not the cheapest universal remote out there.
$150, universalremote.com
Read our full Universal Remote Digital R50 review.
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: Like other watches in the 25-year-old G-Shock line, the MTG-1500 is forged with Mr. T levels of toughness: It can easily survive being banged clumsily against tabletops or whacked against a surfboard in a wipeout. And it's water-resistant to 200 meters. But unlike most other G-Shock watches, which are primarily plastic, the MTG-1500's body and band are stainless steel, with a few tasteful black plastic accents.
We half expected to find the MTG-1500 lacking in minor features. Surprisingly, it didn't. It's got a stopwatch mode, dual time-zone support, five different alarms and a countdown timer. Free abundant sunlight or bright artificial light recharges the battery as you wear the watch. Once fully charged, the battery should be able to power the watch for 6 months without additional light.
WIRED Handsome, two-toned steel-and-black styling doesn't blare "nerd," "Swatch-wearing poser" or "too lazy to take off my gym watch." Self-syncs with superaccurate official time stations. Gives you an excuse to say "solar" and "atomic" in the same sentence.
TIRED Digital display too small and can be obscured by watch hands. LED provides uneven illumination in the dark. $500 can buy a timepiece that's much fancier, albeit not atomic.
$500, casio.com
Read our full Casio G-Shock MTG-1500 review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: The skinny on this countertop unit is pretty straightforward: It's the touch-based kitchen computer that won't put you out of house and home. Don't go rushing out to cash in that 401(k), though — despite a recession-friendly price, the Eee Top still feels a little light in the loafers.
The glossy white, semi-opaque keyboard and mouse look stylish out of the box, but after extended handling their light, plastic-y build became annoying. The slim chassis sat solid on our countertop, while the bright, 15.6-inch screen and the integrated speaker bar make up the majority of the Top's sleek profile. Rounding out the device are six USB ports, memory card reader, 1.3-MP web cam and integrated Wi-Fi. We were pretty bummed at the lack of an optical drive, though.
WIRED An all-in-one for the Top Ramen set. Quick, responsive touch interface. Compact design has integrated storage for both keyboard and stylus. Integrated 802.11n and gigabit ethernet ensure throughput thrashings. One-touch shutoff button for hiding porn er, convenience. Runs whisper-quiet.
TIRED Underpowered for heavy web video. A wired keyboard and mouse — on an all-in-one?!? Heats up after extended poke/prod sessions. Anemic 160-GB hard drive. Even a cheapy, noisy optical drive would've been nice. No battery means no mobile computing.
$600 (as tested), asus.com
Read our full Asus ET1602 Eee Top review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: This camera is about the size and shape of a pack of chewing gum, and weighs just 0.68 ounces. It records videos at 352 x 288 pixels, encoding them in the 3-GP format used by many cellphones (the videos can be played on your computer using most media-player software, including QuickTime and RealPlayer).
But the MovieStick is oozing with design flaws. The pinhole-sized lens is located on the long side of the device, rather than the short end, limiting your ability to go truly undercover. Add to that a confusing series of lights that supposedly indicate when the cam is charging, turned on or recording, and you end up with more than one inadvertent video of the floor.
WIRED The smallest video camera we've seen yet. Simple to set up and use. Makes you look like a double agent.
TIRED Location of camera lens makes it hard to go covert. No internal storage or memory card included. Recorded video is shakier and blurrier than outtakes from The Blair Witch Project.
$120, swannsecurity.com
Read our full Swann Micro-VideoCam Recorder review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Kodak’s Theatre HD's raison d'être is straightforward: to shuttle the contents of your PC directly to your television using ethernet or Wi-Fi. Pictures, videos, podcasts, music or any other digital content that may be living on your hard drive (as long as it's not squelched by some DRM straightjacket) can be whisked away by this tiny little box to your television with little to no fuss.
What really sets the Theatre HD Player apart from the rest of the field is how immaculately it performs its tasks. Once you've downloaded Kodak's EasyShare display software, everything is pretty much taken care of. Have a hard drive filled with extra content? No problem. Simply hook it up to one of the player's USB ports and you're ready to go.
WIRED Intuitive UI coupled with a handy RF remote makes setup and playback of multimedia a Zen-like experience. Wealth of connectivity options: component, HDMI, optical or RCA audio, dual USB ports. Transforms crappy YouTube video into semi-watchable content.
TIRED Requires Kodak EasyShare software to get the streaming party started. No Mac compatibility (for now). Pricey, especially for a device without a hard drive. Needs more internet content.
$300, Kodak
Read our full Kodak Theatre HD Player review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Skidding in at 53 pounds (on the lighter side for this category), Ohm's mountain bike-inspired geometry and its nine-level power-assist and regeneration system make it a smart, nimble and efficient two-wheeler.
On pavement and trail the BionX power plant, mounted on the rear hub, employs a unique sensor technology that is constantly adjusting the level of assistance it gives you based on the terrain. Encountering some mushy road? More power is delivered to the gears. Gliding down paved asphalt? The juice is dialed back. And if your thighs are flushed with lactic acid on a sheer hill, a flick of the trusty thumb throttle cracks the whip and the motor totally takes over, no pedaling required. But for all this innovation and comfort, you will, however, have to part with a spouse-enraging $3,450. Is it worth it? Well, it is a ton of fun.
WIRED Excellent Shimano parts mix with disc brakes and RockShox suspension fork. Lockable battery compartment hides space for mobile phone, wallet, media player and your other little stuff. Regeneration mode gives extra on-bike battery life. Comfortable suspension seat post. Four- to six-hour charge time.
TIRED Throttle position needs to be improved for optimal bike handling. Price steeper than any hill the bike can handle.
$3450, Ohm Cycles
Read our full Ohm Cycles XS700 review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: For about $300 more than the average netbook, the UC7807u offers a scintillating array of grownup specs. Intel 2.0-GHz Core 2 Duo CPU? Check. 250-GB hard drive? Yep. 3 GB of memory, a glossy 13.3-inch display, a slot-loading optical drive and ports galore (three USB and an HDMI)? You betcha! Best of all, with its fetching brushed aluminum chassis, no one will mistake this for a budget notebook.
Unfortunately, the UC7807u also has all the telltale signs of some obvious corner cutting. Forget about gaming. Due to Intel's torpid integrated GMA 4500MHD graphics card, even moderately intensive titles won't run properly. But our main beef with the UC7807u is the feeble 6-cell battery which clocked in at a disappointing 3 hours, 25 minutes — a full hour shorter than most other notebooks in this category.
WIRED Recession-worthy price. Built like a tank. Slick, touch-sensitive volume and multimedia controls.
TIRED Tips the scales for a notebook in this category. Battery drains faster than an ATM at a strip club. Epic fail on the tiny circular touchpad. It's cramped and serves no discernable purpose. Onboard speakers spit out tinny, distorted sound. HDMI, but no Blu-ray?
$800 as tested, Gateway
Read our full Gateway UC7807u review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: It's no wonder this watch ran away with my heart; for the competitive runner or multisport athlete seeking a personal best in 2009, the Polar RS800CX is the required training device. Because of incredibly robust desktop software, tracking of obscure performance metrics, and a wide variety of add-on sensors, the RS800CX can help you measure, analyze and improve nearly every aspect of your training program.
WIRED Offers better heart-rate monitoring than your average hospital. Incredibly customizable from in-watch display, to software interface, to training programs. GPS and barometric altimeter combined with location tracking mean you'll never wonder where you wandered. Extensible pods make watch more sport-versatile than Lance Armstrong.
TIRED Even beer goggles won't pretty up this ugly watch face. May need to hire a coach anyway — just to teach you how to use the PC-only desktop software.
$500, Polar
Read our full Polar RS800CX MULTI review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: The pocket rocket we've been packing in our pants recently (full name: Optoma DLP EP-PK-101 Pico Pocket Projector) is one of the first mini projectors to hit the market. It's also one of the best, even though a number of flaws spill from the tiny device.
Styled like a '40s-era Zippo, the piano-black portable feels more natural in the hand than a lot of cellphones. But it's not size that matters to us, it's the video components! The projector is comprised of a combo-rig LED lamp and a DLP chip (courtesy of Texas Instruments) that sets the resolution at 480 x 320 pixels with a range output of 9 lumens. Yes, we know this is low compared to full-bodied projectors like Benq's gargantuan MP512 ST 2500-lumen projector but for something this small, it's remarkable.
WIRED Perfect projector for parties. Rectangular lens creates wide image that keeps the image from stretching. Fine picture quality, 8-96 inches. Startup time > 4 seconds. Dead-sexy hardware.
TIRED Lithium-ion batteries die after 2 hours' use; how are we supposed to watch our Battlestar marathon? Battery recharge time 4 frakkin' hours. Suck-tastic speaker. Unless you have a video-out adapter, you can't project Office docs from your PC. Projector gets hot enough to fry bacon after running 30 minutes.
$400, Optoma
Read our full Optoma EP-PK-101 Pico Pocket Projector review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Are you the schlemiel who's always dropping his cellphone or camera at parties? Or maybe you're the schlemazel who always gets the drink spilled on him? Either way, if you're looking for a camera to fit a clumsy or accident-prone lifestyle, the shockproof, waterproof, and cold-resistant Stylus 1050 SW can take the beating from fumbles, faceplants or full-speed crashes, and still keep clicking.
About the size and shape as a pack of smokes, the 1050 is equipped with an accelerometer letting you tinker with settings by tapping on the top and the sides. This lets you do useful stuff like turn the flash on and off with a gloved mitt or preview pictures with one hand while you fend off a tiger shark with the other.
WIRED Shockproof to 5 feet and waterproof 10 means you can bang it on the edge of the pool as you fall in with no harm done. Tap feature lets you change settings without futzing with buttons, and the camera can handle alpine frigidity with aplomb. Comes with a microSD adapter for greater media versatility.
TIRED Lens cover slides more easily than Ricky Henderson. The battery is easily inserted backwards, making you think it's dead or the camera is malfunctioning. Weak zoom and poor macro ability; this camera could use a bifocal upgrade.
$300, Olympus
Read our full Olympus Stylus 1050 SW review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Touted as the thinnest and lightest BlackBerry yet, the Curve 8900 has some much-needed upgrades over its predecessor, but also some disappointments.
Wi-Fi is hot and easy to set up, the camera got a bump to 3.2 megapixels, the 16 GB MicroSD storage can hold up to 20 hours of video, and the high-res screen is fantastic in any light. On the other hand, callers were hard to hear, documents were difficult to create, and RIM's revamped proprietary browser is good for surfing the Internet but isn't as smart about automatically resizing webpages as the browsers on competing smartphones.
WIRED Slick, sexy design mashes the best of the Bold and Curve 8830. Brilliant, high-resolution screen is one of the best we've seen on a RIM device. Full HTML-rendering on websites. 3.2-megapixel camera is even better when paired with video-recording capabilities; 3.5mm headphone jack means no clumsy adapters. Near 5-hour battery life is most impressive.
TIRED 3G is MIA. Despite the powerful 512-Mhz processor, the software still lags. New website and software don't perform as well as they should. Phone quality was mixed and loud speakers fail to compensate for somewhat distorted music playback.
$200 with a two year contract, RIM
Read our full RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: This handset (which arrives in some of the most gorgeous packaging I've ever seen a consumer electronic encased in) is almost laughably banal in its actual construction. A silver slider with wide-spaced keys, it posses a passing resemblance to the Nokia 5200, albeit with a larger (2.2-inch) screen. But, once you switch it on and start using it, things begin to get interesting.
The operating system orbits around Facebook synchronization. Basically you take the phone online, pair it with your Facebook account, and all of your various Facebook applications become active on the mobile. Your Facebook address book syncs up with the phone's address book. Events from your Facebook calendar become part of the phone's calendar. Take a picture with the 3.2-megapixel camera, and you can automatically upload those shots to a Facebook album.
WIRED Brightly hued, easy to use, easy-to-sync OS pairs perfectly with your Facebook account. Skype integration is thoughtful. Thoughtfully spaced keys make texting, entering URLs rather pleasant. Camera takes photos that are sharp enough to be a profile picture. Extremely cheap for an unlocked device.
TIRED Humdrum hardware punctuates novel OS. Not offered in the United States ... yet. Battery life is clinically depressing when surfing the web, using Skype.
$112 (estimated), Three
Read our full INQ1 Facebook Phone review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: HP has been tinkering with touch tech for a couple of years. But they have yet to nail the bull's eye with a machine that mixes mature hardware with a haptic interface that feels like more than just a half-assed effort. So, we were cautiously optimistic with the TouchSmart tx2z. The good news? As HP's first multitouch convertible tablet, it's got a lot of potential.
Converting from notebook to tablet proved painless, thanks to a solid hinge and the included pen. After swinging the 1280 x 800 screen around (and folding it back), we found two goodies. First, using the pen automatically disables the touchscreen (to prevent palm-related havoc), and second, HP included an active digitizer for handwritten input. This made reckless activities like e-mailing while strolling around the block surprisingly easy. Even jotting down quick notes using a finger (instead of the pen) gave us minimal hassle.
WIRED Fully baked as both a touch and tablet device. Travels well with its compact and stylish chassis. Includes quick keys for rotating screen orientation. Mini media remote and pen conveniently hide away in chassis. Altec Lansing speakers strike decent balance between volume and clarity. Extra goodies aplenty: biometric security, webcam, dual headphone jacks, 802.11n compatibility and 5-in-1 card reader.
TIRED Bloated OS hinders performance of otherwise decent specs. Occasionally laggy switches between notebook and tablet mode. No multitouch love for the trackpad. Terrible viewing angles and weak visibility in direct sunlight. Fan sounds like a leaf-blower at a My Bloody Valentine show.
$1550 (as tested), HP
Read our full HP TouchSmart tx2z review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
: Nero's LiquidTV TiVo PC looks like a TiVo and acts like a TiVo, but, brother, it ain't no TiVo.
Actually, the package makes your PC act like a TiVo by adding a USB TV tuner and the same TiVo software that drives the set-tops. You also get a for-reals TiVo remote and an IR receiver so you can command content from the couch.
Ironically, that's where you're gonna get pissed. The remote can't launch the software, so you'll have to physically walk over and mouse it open. The remote can be programmed to turn your TV on and off, but it can't put your PC in standby mode or wake it up again. If you do that manually, the IR receiver fails to wake up with the rest of the system.
WIRED Includes a one-year TiVo subscription, and after that it's a cheaper-than-set-top $99 per year. The software can auto-convert recordings to iPod or Sony PSP format. Integrates with any TiVo boxes you already have. Extra storage is just an external hard drive away.
TIRED The remote lacks necessary PC controls. Not measurably better than Windows Media Center — which, incidentally, is free. The tuner supports ClearQAM, but the software doesn't, so forget digital channels unless you hook up the antenna.
$125, Tivo
Read our full Nero LiquidTV TiVo PC review.
Check Wired.com's latest Product Reviews, updated daily.
Back in January, Jason Shellen, a former Googler known for his work on Blogger and Google Reader, launched Plinky, a new approach to blogging that wanted to give users a way to be more engaged in the process. The service got off to a fast start, but talk about it has dwindled in recent months. So now Shellen is ready to start something new. Something that utilizes yes, Twitter.
While Plinky will continue on as a product, Shellen is changing the name of the company to Thing Labs. The catalyst of this change was Plinky acquiring the technology Google Reader co-founder Chris Wetherell has been working on since he left Google. Wetherell is joining the company as the VP of Technology. The rest of the Plinky team will be joining in this new endeavor, and Shellen also tells me that they’ve made a new high-profile hire on the engineering end, that they’re not ready to announce yet.
So what is Thing Labs? Apparently, it soon will offer a new user-facing social media application that makes use of existing social networks. Shellen wouldn’t go beyond saying that it will involve the hot social network of choice, Twitter. It should be out at the end of June, we hear.
The company is also moving its headquarters from the east bay of San Francisco, into the city.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
It looks like Twitter has just rolled out its verified accounts. As you can seeing on Michael’s personal account, there’s a “Verified Account” logo right above his name. Twitter has previously announced that it was going to do this, but did so tonight without warning.
What’s odd is that Michael never actually verified his account with anyone at Twitter. Granted, it’s obvious that it is his actual account, but it’s still a bit odd that they would verify it without, you know, verifying it. Expect to see this rolling out over more accounts over the next several days.
What else is a bit odd — okay, odd in a self-serving way — is that a guy with more followers than Michael (yours truly) would not have a verified account while his boss does. Sigh. Even TechCrunch’s regular account with over 700,000 followers isn’t verified. I guess it’s only those select “celebrities” or high profile people that are getting verified, following the Facebook model for vanity URLs.
Update: Here’s Twitter’s explanation for who gets the verified accounts right now:
We’re starting with well-known accounts that have had problems with impersonation or identity confusion. (For example, well-known artists, athletes, actors, public officials, and public agencies). We may verify more accounts in the future, but because of the cost and time required, we’re only testing this feature with a small set of folks for the time being. As the test progresses we may be able to expand this test to more accounts over the next several months.
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Read more of this story at Slashdot.
At first glance, this little doodad seems like a straight-to-SkyMall throwaway gadget. But I think the Bikeman is actually quite a handy device. First, it’s got a light on the front, so your handlebars aren’t going to look like some sort of sensor array with all the junk on ‘em. Second, it’s easily removable, so you can take it with you if you’re parking in the rain or somewhere shady. Third, it’s a good replacement for a regular mp3 player, since headphones block out very important noises like cars coming up, sirens, and so on.
Unfortunately, it does look pretty nerdy.
At only 2.3W, you’re not going to be blown out of the stirrups by this thing, but the speaker is directional so you’re getting the full force, such as it is. It’ll run for 10 hours of play time (more, I assume, if you just use the light) and mercifully can be charged via USB while you’re filling up its 2GB of internal memory with songs.
At $130 it’s a bit of an expensive toy, but if you really like to listen while you ride and don’t want to endanger your life by wearing headphones.
[via Technabob]
A teardown of the newly introduced Amazon Kindle DX shows an e-book reader with many replaceable parts that make it service-friendly for its users.
Amazon launched the Kindle DX, a large size e-reader with a 9.7-inch screen and features such as auto rotate from portrait to landscape mode a few weeks ago. Priced at $489, the Kindle DX started shipping June 10. Wired.com’s review of the Kindle DX suggests the larger screen makes it more readable than the Kindle 2 but the device isn’t wallet friendly.
It didn’t take long for the technicians at Rapid Repair to take the Kindle apart. Despite its iPod-like back plate and construction, opening up the Kindle is easy. A few screws and a grey plastic bezel is all that holds it in place.
Kindle DX has a 3.7V Lithium Polymer battery with a 1530mAh rating. A few more steps and the device’s innards lay bare to show off processor chips from Samsung and a wireless card.
The best part about the process is how clearly the text continues to be visible on the display. It proves why bi-stable displays, such as used in e-book readers, score over LCDs. Though they have lower brighness when compared to LCDs, bistable displays can retain the image on the screen until the image is refreshed and even when there is no power.
For a detailed how-to on taking the Kindle DX apart, head over to the Rapid Repair site.
Photo: Kindle DX stripped/Rapid Repair
Back in 1960, U.S. Army Captain Bertrand Brinley published the Rocket Manual for Amateurs, one of the greatest DIY books ever written. Its cover price reads 75 cents. Buying a copy today in a used bookstore could set you back more than $100. But it's that good. (I know, I have it.)
There is a considerable amount of information on rocket motor making in RMFA. The line drawings are excellent and the writing clear and straightforward. A lot of people bought this book back in the 50s and 60s, because making rocket motors was a fashionable pastime, and there were lots of clubs and societies that would tinker around making rocket engines.
But like any high energy hobby, things could and would go wrong and people got hurt. Rocket engines had a nasty habit of blowing up in the maker's face and causing injury. There is a part of the process where the propellant is rammed into a tube and that's pretty dangerous. (I personally know of a couple people who hurt themselves this way.)
So, the activity changed, and rocket people were encouraged to buy commercial rocket motors instead of rolling their own.
That is indeed much safer. But I think you lose something when you give up the core part of the activity. That's why in Absinthe and Flamethrowers I provide instructions for creating a small but powerful rocket motor wholly out of stuff available at Home Depot or SuperTarget. There's just something so ... satisfying about homebrewing a rocket with stuff you got at Walmart.
Brinley's book contains instructions for making for "micrograin" rocket engines (pulverized zinc and sulfur ramrodded into a steel container.) I tried it and it burns like crazy. Whoa nelly, that's some hot stuff. Probably too dangerous for an amateur.
Source: Boing Boing | 11 Jun 2009 | 11:51 pm
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AFP - US videogame sales declined by 23 percent in May from a year ago, falling below one billion dollars for the first time since August 2007, market research firm NPD Group reported on Thursday.
Section: Computers, Mobile Computers, Wireless, Gadgets / Other
Even while netbooks have become all the craze, MiniPCs or tablets are still pretty popular and Archos just announced a new, innovative Archos 9PCtablet. Previously, the most portable, yet complex in terms of features, device was the Internet Media Tablets, however, the 9PCtablet looks to be a nice upgrade. Essentially, it comes with many core features of a normal computer, and is totally touch.
On the go, it is important to many people that their device feature the latest technology and come with as many features as possible. Netbooks do a good job of handling this, but tablets are even more portable. The latest Archos device even features the Windows 7 OS, an on screen keyboard (meaning no physical keyboard), 80GB hard drive, runs on Intel’s Atom Z515 processor, Bluetooth tethering capabilities, as well as 2 antennas.
With the two antennas, users are able to access television via the DVBT TV antenna. Since it doesn’t come with an actual keyboard, the device becomes a whole lot lighter and portable; in fact, it measures in at under 800g while it is only 0.63 inches thick. In addition, as the name implies, the touch screen measures in at an adequate 9 inches. For all your video conferencing needs, don’t forget it comes with a webcam and optional 3G service.
Since the device can’t be released until Windows 7 is officially released, expect the Archos 9PCtablet to be sold in October, after Windows 7 is available. In terms of pricing, according to UMPC Portal, it will be on sale for 500 Euros, or $706.
Read [Archos]
Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Samsung’s long-rumored Android phone could be inching closer to reality as the company prepares to offer the device on T-Mobile’s network.
The Android device codenamed ‘Bigfoot’ will be available on T-Mobile’s network this summer, says the Boy Genius Report site.
The phone could become the third Android device on T-Mobile, following the HTC G1, which released last year, and the HTC Magic or the G2 phone expected to launch in the next few weeks. Unlike the HTC Magic G2, which has just a touchscreen display, Samsung’s Android phone will likely have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
Samsung’s Android phone will also have a 3 megapixel camera, a 3-inch AMOLED touch screen display and support 3G. Earlier reports had pegged the device’s launch towards the end of the year. But there’s no word yet on pricing for the phone.
The smartphones war has heated up the recent launch of the Palm Pre and the upcoming iPhone 3G S phones. Missing in action is Android. Sure, several major handset makers including Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson have claimed they have Android devices in the works. But, with the exception of the HTC G1, the rest, at this point, can only be considered vaporware.
If Samsung can successfully bring its latest device to market, it could help change the perception of Android as an interesting new technology but one with few real products to back it up.
See also:
Smartphone War Heats Up, Google Phones Still MIA
Photo: Samsung Android phone/Boy Genius Report
Section: Computers, Security, Software / Applications
The New York Attorney General’s office has slapped Symantec and McAfee with $375,000 in fines over charges they automatically renewed customer’s subscriptions without their consent.
“Investigators found that the two companies had ‘failed to adequately disclose to consumers that subscriptions would automatically be renewed and that consumers would be charged,’ the office of Andrew Cuomo said in a statement Wednesday announcing the settlement. ‘Companies cannot play hide the ball when it comes to fees consumers are being charged.’”
Both companies also agreed to make clear disclosures of renewal fees when customers sign up. Automatic renewals are nothing new, and anti-virus software vendors like Symantec and McAfee say it was for their customer’s safety as auto-renewals prevent them from the risks associated with having out of date anti-virus software on their computers. However, they worked with the New York AG’s office for 2 years to improve their practices.
If you are a Norton user and want to unsubscribe, visit the Norton Account website. McAfee users can call 1-866-622-3911. Both will also refund auto-renewal fees within 60 days of the initial charge.
Read [PCWorld]
Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Badges! Badges! Badges! (Thanks, Dave!)
Apple has traditionally held its ground as a premium computer manufacturer, but it might just be getting sucked into a recession-prompted price war.
The company’s recent MacBook price cuts signify its reluctant conformity to the economic downturn. At its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple shaved hundreds of dollars off its MacBook models. The high-end, 15-inch MacBook Pros dropped from $2,000 to $1,700. And the price of the unibody MacBook (now renamed the 13-inch MacBook Pro) fell from $1,300 to $1,200. Apple’s most inexpensive MacBook, the lone white model, remains $1,000. (See chart.)
“For a while they’ve been ignoring what’s been happening in the economy,” said Richard Shim, an IDC analyst. “This is an indication that they’re realizing that the first quarter didn’t go as well as it has for them historically. I think this puts them closer in mind about what’s going on in the PC world.”
Still, Apple has avoided making even deeper price cuts, thanks to the juicy profit margins already baked into its products, the availability of cheap components, and the fact that the company also makes money by selling apps and music to iPhone and iPod owners. All of these factors mean that Apple has room to comfortably trim prices even further, if it deems it necessary.
For instance, the company dropped the price of its now low-end smartphone, the iPhone 3G, to just $100 with a two-year contract. But that cut doesn’t cost Apple as much as it might appear, given that the company still gets a carrier subsidy of several hundred dollars for each iPhone.
Apple’s computers have historically been priced well above the average PC. However, Apple’s first quarter of 2009 market-share numbers suggest the company is struggling to compete as a premium brand name in the face of the economic recession. In the first quarter of 2009, Apple’s U.S. notebook market share shrank 0.4 percent compared to the same quarter a year earlier, according to Shim. And in worldwide notebook market share, the company saw 0.3 percent growth compared to the first quarter of 2008, Shim said.
Additionally, Apple is likely hurting from its competitors’ aggressive pricing, cast into relief by Microsoft’s recent Laptop Hunters ad campaign, a BrandIndex survey indicates. The pseudo reality-TV commercials denounce Apple computers as too expensive and even implies Mac users are simple-minded snobs who buy gadgets as a fashion statement. As a result, Microsoft is detracting from Apple’s “value” score by convincing a substantial number of consumers that they get less for their money by buying a Mac, according to the survey.
By cutting its prices somewhat, Apple may also be seizing the opportunity to strike a blow against the netbook market. In 2008, low-powered, budget netbook PCs saw rapid growth, driven by value-conscious consumers looking for a good deal. Apple has no netbook in its lineup, and has said it has no plans to create a netbook.
Fortunately for Apple, netbook sales are seeing a significant slowdown in 2009. In April, netbook manufacturers Acer, Asus and Micro Star International each reported fewer netbooks were sold than expected. Their netbook shipments for the first quarter of 2009 fell considerably below shipments during the third quarter of 2008. Asus, for example, hoped to ship 1 million Asus Eee PC systems during the first quarter, but only 900,000 units sold.
Thus, Apple’s MacBook price cuts are a strategic move to reclaim growth while the netbook market is shrinking. This move allows Apple to continue to avoid offering a netbook, which is wise, because an Apple netbook would have cannibalized MacBook sales, according to ThinkPanmure analyst Vijay Rakesh. With the reduced MacBook price tags, Rakesh expects Apple to see double-digit growth in notebook marketshare — up to 20 percent — in the third quarter of 2009.
Regardless, Apple’s MacBook price tags are still well above the cost of the average notebook — $860 in the United States, according to Shim. Apple’s cheapest MacBook is anchored at $1,000, and Apple could afford to bring it down even lower if it so chose.
According to Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, Apple’s new pricing for its MacBook line and the price drop on its lightweight MacBook Air will not compromise much on its profit margins.
“They are not favoring market share over profitability in a big way,” Bajarin explained. “They have already taken the pricing curve down on the unibody and chipsets, so they are building on those lower costs.”
Will Apple deliver a mobile computer for the average Joe in terms of cost? Perhaps so, in the form of a touchscreen tablet that many Apple enthusiasts are placing their bets on. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicts such a device — a blown-up iPod Touch, of sorts — will land as soon as 2010.
See Also:
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Okay, seriously. We love us some Android, but we have to wonder: Do these manufacturers have some secret pact that requires them to make every Android phone ugly as hell?
BoyGenius managed to dig up this shot of Samsung’s upcoming Android release, currently known only as “Bigfoot”. According to their source, Bigfoot will tote a 3 megapixel camera alongside a 3.0″ capacitive AMOLED touchscreen when it launches “soon.” This is the third supposed picture of Bigfoot to surface, each looking dramatically different.
The face looks good enough and that QWERTY keyboard looks downright welcoming - but if this thing turns out to be the real deal and doesn’t come in any color besides “Freakydeaky Green”, Samsung needs some new palette pickers.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
By common definition, the new Samsung Crest Solar is about as far from a smartphone as you can get - but if you’re going somewhere where electric outlets are scarce, it’s probably a smart idea to carry one.
Available later this month in India, Europe, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, and Latin America, the Crest Solar will be Samsung’s first solar-powered cell phone to reach the market. For every hour of rays this guy catches, it walks away with 5-10 minutes of talk time.
Beyond being the first Samsung to come packed with solar-panels, it seems they’re also using it as a testing ground for a few things on the software end. “Mobile Tracker” sends out an alert when the SIM in the phone has been swapped and “sends out an SOS message in an emergency” (though we’re not quite sure what that entails), while “Fake Call” lets you get out of that blind-date-gone-wrong without hurting any feelings. A few other features are also sneaking in on a locational basis, such as a bicyclist-friendly profile which blocks calls outside of those important enough to answer while riding, or a prayer-reminder alert system. No word yet on pricing.
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
FROM GAMERTELL - Gamertell looks back over the major announcements of E3 2009 and pinpoints the not-so-hot moments.
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Section: Video, Content, Web, Online Music/Video
To heck with the high-tech problems associated with going through all the trouble of installing a card reader and hidden camera over an ATM to steal from Joe Public. These guys took the old-fashioned approach—brute force.
I can just hear it. “Hey Bubba. What say we go down into that big ole city over yonder and break us out some of them there money machines?” (Followed by a large belch and some scratching). It really doesn’t look like a whole lot of brain cells were put into use for this robbery.
First of all, I love how several of the guys didn’t even bother with masks. Next, you can tell they are just pleased as punch with themselves when they knocked down the wall around the second ATM. They stop and do a high-five. You might want to be worrying about hurrying there, guys. Next, talk about no high tech gadgets to assist in this crime. I think the most high tech part was they actually had a vehicle there to assist in the getaway and that had to have some electronics in it somewhere.
Way to go men. Hang that Rebel flag high.
via: gizmodo
Full Story » | Written by Jodie Andrefski for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
"Media giants are in the early stages of becoming Internet gatekeepers by requiring broadband providers to pay for their Web-based content and services and include them as part of basic Internet access for all subscribers," an ACA press release on the issue warns. "These content providers are also preventing subscribers who are interested in the content from independently accessing it on broadband networks of providers that have refused to pay."Cable group turns net neutrality around over ISP access fees
Rob posted his review earlier today after getting his hands on Amazon's latest e-reader, the $489 Kindle DX:
"Though based on the Kindle 2, it's the first version that seems a beautiful thing...That said, Amazon's weird pay-to-play online service for converting file formats is still a black mark against Kindles of any size--especially when you pay $480 for the hardware."
Here's what others are saying...
• Wired's Steven Levy likes the improvements, but thinks the price isn't quite right.
• Gizmodo found the inclinometer useful for PDFs.
• The NYT's take: "For those of us who don't need to read PDFs or, say, all 1,328 pages of 'Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies,' the regular Kindle should suffice."
• Walt Mossberg at the WSJ would prefer "on-screen touch controls that could instantly adapt to its size and orientation."
• Ed Baig at USA Today didn't see any major differences with the speed at which pages refresh; he did enjoy the big screen, but not the price.
• Engadget unboxed the thing and found a "less comfortable keyboard."
• CNET decided the DX's "larger chassis has its pluses and minuses."
• Early Amazon user reviews are posting, too: 4 out of 5 stars based on 20+ reviews thus far.
Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 11 Jun 2009 | 7:06 pm
Here’s a fun time waster for when you’re bored at work: iSeedSpit, an iPhone game that simulates the experience of spitting watermelon seeds.
To “spit,” you blow into the iPhone microphone, and the seed travels at a distance depending on your respiratory rigor. In the end you get a measurement; you get three tries for a high score.
Fun! Just make sure to keep a bowl of soup in your cubicle for when your boss hears your sporadic exhales — so you can pretend you were blowing on it to cool it down.
iSeedSpit is $2 in the App Store.
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(Thanks, Heidi!)
The Star Trek communicator was arguably the original cellphone, and clearly the model for Motorola’s Startac (even the name was a thinly disguised homage). The iPhone, in turn, is obviously the closest thing us 21st century humans have to the technology of the future. It fits, then, that there should be an application which turns your iPhone into its future counterpart.
And of course, there is. The $0.99 application looks just like the prop from the original series, and consists of the same useless flashing lights. The sounds are pretty much dead on, and the very best part, guaranteed to make you smile, is that you can “open” the “lid” with a flick of your wrist. If you’re running this on an iPhone, you can actually dial numbers from within the app using a custom, retro dial-pad (the iPod Touch, obviously, can’t do this).
Beam me up, Scotty!
Product page [iTunes]
FROM GAMERTELL - On Tuesday June 16, 2009 Xbox Live and some sections of Xbox.com will be down for up to 24 hours for maintenance related to new features that were announced at E3 2009.
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Lenses are arguably the most important part of a photographer’s setup. Sure, you might have twenty-something megapixels inside your camera, but if you have junky glass in front of it, every single one of those pixels will look awful. Before you upgrade your camera, upgrade the lenses.
And think about fixed focal length lenses. They’re not as flexible as zooms, for sure, and these days modern lens design means that a good (read: expensive) zoom will be as good as a prime, or fixed, lens. So why bother? It’s all about the depth of field, baby. Zooms rarely have a maximum aperture of less than ƒ2.8. This is ok, but when you pop a prime with a bigger opening on your camera, say ƒ1.8 or ƒ1.4, you not only get more light (useful for night shooting) but you also get a very shallow depth of field. This means that you can keep your subject’s eyes sharp, but their ears, hair and everything behind them will be thrown into a distraction-free blur. The effect can be stunning.
I picked up a Nikon 85mm ƒ1.8D lens about a month ago. These lenses are a bargain at around $430 in the US. There is a more expensive ƒ1.4 model available, but it costs three times the price (although it has something of a cult following). The following is a short review, but instead of the usual product shots we take for these pieces, I’m posting a lot of images actually taken with the lens. Keep reading for the lowdown.
The photo above shows the Empire State Building in New York. It was shot wide open at 1/60th sec and ISO 1600 on a Nikon D700. Almost nothing has been done in post other than some sharpening for the screen. On the lights of both buildings you can see the beginnings of the modern amateur’s obsession, bokeh. It’s a Japanese word referring to the rendering of out of focus highlights by a lens, and discussion often gets rather flowery, with words like “creamy” being used. Despite this nonsense, the quality of these highlights makes a big difference to an image (and is one reason that Leica’s M lenses are so damn amazing).
This lens handles it well, but there are some odd color shifts in the highlights – to magenta in the foreground and to green in the background. This picture shows it better:
It’s a street in Barcelona, again shot wide open, this time at 1/125th sec at ISO 3200 and straight out of the camera (no post processing). Here you can see colored halos around the highlights, although the fact that the lights themselves are colored doesn’t help. The main thing affecting the shape of these highlights is the shape of the aperture itself. This lens has nine blades to form the aperture, so it has a pretty round shape.
This photo shows how dramatic the fall-off of focus can be. As lenses get longer, they already have a smaller depth-of-field. They also appear to compress the image, front-to-back, which makes for very flattering portraits (more on that in a moment). Here is a poster I saw on a lamppost in Brooklyn. You can clearly see that not even the entire piece of paper is in focus.
Speaking of portraits, this is my friend Whisky Tom. The long-ish lens is very flattering to the features and doesn’t distort them much (yes, his eyes really are that big). Remember how people’s faces change when you shoot with a wideangle lens? Their noses look huge, their faces distorted. The opposite happens at 85mm, and anything between around 70mm and 110mm is considered a “portrait lens”. See how the wide aperture throws his nose out of focus and completely blurs an otherwise busy background, drawing attention to the eyes which are pin-sharp (thanks to modern autofocus and the fact that I took these shots before we started on the inevitable whisky).
So how does it perform? Plastic construction means that is very light, and actually quite small. The lens comes with a large metal lens-hood (model number HN-23) which can be left on all the time to keep fingers away from the large front element. Internally, the lens uses rear-focussing, which means only a single group of elements at the back move when focusing. Combine this with a fast camera like the D700 and the thing focusses in a New York Second, letting you grab moving street-shots like the one above while walking. It really is fast, and very positive.
Most of the time, that is. Sometimes, when focusing on far away objects, the lens appears not to lock on. In fact, it doesn’t always seem to actually notice you have pressed the focus button. I am looking into this — focusing quickly on something nearby clears things up in the meantime.
In short, there’s no reason not to buy this lens. I totally love using it, and it seems that I’m not the only one who likes it. I was stuck on a Manhattan street corner, unable to leave because the light was so amazing, and a nice chap spoke to me. “Excuse me, that’s the 85mm ƒ1.8, right?” We had a camera-nerd conversation for a few minutes, and he loved the pictures I showed him on the back of the camera. If you’re rich, you could go for the highly recommended 85mm ƒ1.4. If you aren’t and you’re looking for something both fun and which will bring some interesting new elements to your pictures, try this one.
It’ll work on any 35mm Nikon, and full-frame digital Nikon, and on any crop-frame Nikon, although in the last case it’ll turn into a rather long 128mm lens. And if you have a Nikon D40, D40X or D60, you’ll have to focus it manually, as these cameras don’t have an internal focusing motor.
Product page [Nikon]
In a lengthy rant on nin.com, Trent Reznor writes:
I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it's now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.
All this from the guy who spent the last few years going deep into ARGs, online forums, and Twitter.
[via Pitchfork]
image by Andra Veraart
Section: Gadgets / Other, GPS/Navigation
A new shoe has been developed with built in GPS technology. This product is geared towards caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients in order to give them piece of mind in case they are unable to locate the person. The GPS shoe’s chip will allow parties to track the person online and receive real time updates as they are on the move.
Due to the disorientation associated with Alzheimer’s, more and more patients each year wander away from homes and lose their way back. Search and rescue operations through local law enforcement departments are then called to locate the missing patient. In some cases, if search operations are unsuccessful, the patient can die from exposure or hunger. The GPS shoe can not only save lives, but also save the government millions of dollars.
The shoe was developed by the GPS tracking software maker GTX Corporation and Aetrex, a shoe developer. The shoe will retail between $200 and $300 and purchasers will have the option of setting up a boundary system. For $20 a month, the caregiver can receive alerts if the patient leaves the designated area. The GPS shoe has an expected release date of sometime in 2010.
Read: [CNN]
Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Native PDF support (there's no zooming) deprives Sony's Reader of its last technical advantage over the Kindle lineup. At the new size, the Kindle looks well-designed, simple, even sexy: a third of an inch thick, it has 3G wireless access to the Kindle Store, 16 shades of gray, 3.3GB of storage, auto-rotation, text-to-speech (if permitted by the publisher) and the experimental web browser.
For those who just buy books and mags, and who don't plan on reading stuff from their computer, the DX's combination of best-of-class hardware and Amazon's well-stocked store make it the one to own. For the rest of us, however, its format support remains a pain: if you don't like PDF or plain text, you're tied up in an irritating file conversion service: at $480, the DX is quite expensive enough.
If you're not sure about it because of the bigger size, check out our gallery of the Kindle DX alongside everyday items. Though based on the Kindle 2, it's the first version that seems a beautiful thing.
Update: Testing PDF for speed and compatibility, I tried a 2.4MB PDF of "All you can eat: autophagy in neurogeneration of neuroprotection," by Phillipp Jaeger and Tony Wyss-Coray. It loaded in 3-4 seconds, with 1 second transitions between pages -- same as plain text! Nothing in the document confused it, layout was good, including charts, pictures, superscript and greek letters, etc. Hilbert's Foundations of Geometry, full of pointy-headed Tex-set equations, was just as snappy.
The scrolling is awesome. [Delicious Library 2 via @dmoren]
Virgin Mobile’s service plans have their merits, so we’ll forgive’m for the fact that their pre-paid phone line-up is a bit.. underwhelming. Most people who pre-pay don’t give a damn about whether or not their phone triples as a fart machine and a laser level, so we promise: we won’t hate on the Mantra.
The Mantra has just about everything you’d expect out of a $60 phone - in other words, not much. Bluetooth, Internal/External display, and a camera. They don’t mention the resolution/size of the display or megapixel count on the camera, so don’t expect much.
For just $60 bucks and whatever it costs to build a time machine these days, you can be the envy of everyone in 1973.
(Crap, we broke our promise)
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What’s going on at Apple? Here at Gadget Lab we’re subscribing to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice theory: that Steve Jobs steps away from the Cupertino campus for a few months and the monkeys take over, playing all the pranks they can get away with before the boss gets back to work.
Exhibit A: The name of the new iPhone. The Joy of Tech speculates that it may actually be pronounced “iPhone 3G Ass”. This is plausible, but more likely is that there are some Woz fans still at Apple and they snuck through a homage to the Apple ][GS. There are some other parallels, too. The ][GS had 256KB RAM, the iPhone 3G S has 256MB; the GS stood for Graphics and Sound, the S stands for Speed and Secrecy.
Exhibit B: Prices. Apple has dropped them, drastically. A $99 iPhone? Check. A cheap-ish MacBook Air? Check. $29 OS upgrade? Check, check, check.
When Jobs gets back to the office, we expect there will be trouble. Key executives will be forced to stand in the corner in pointy hats (probably with a Vista logo on them) and with a single wave of his hand, Jobs will restore prices to their original levels, change the name of the new iPhone to something that doesn’t sound like a Sony camera model number and, more importantly, erase from all living memory evidence of the plastic MacBook and the $99 iPhone 3G. Apple doesn’t sell hobbling, legacy products, remember?
The restoration will be complete. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, has it not?
If you have stripped down an old road bike and turned it into a fashionable’n'fun fixed-gear machine, you will have a bunch of parts left over. Once you have weighed them in your hands and laughed maniacally at the sheer weight of the gear cassettes and brake assemblies you no longer have to carry with every single revolution of the pedals, you might wonder if you can recycle them.
If so, you may consider a rather stylish clock, just like those made by Kenneth Armstrong. He has been tinkering with cogs, disk-brakes and even entire wheels for seven years, combining parts into these sculptural timepieces. There’s something of the steampunk about these, and if you check out Armstrong’s site, you’ll see he’s been rather busy, turning out locking posts made form old d-locks and tables fashioned from bike wheels and tubing. There’s even a rather uncomfortable but cool-looking chair welded from old handlebars. We love them.
Recycled Sculpture [A Portfolio Recycled via Urban Velo]
You’ll need a screwdriver to do it, but the sealed batteries in the new MacBook Pros announced last Monday are as user replaceable as those of the MacBook before it. IFixit has already carried out its customary explorations inside the body of the new notebook, and found that, apart from the rearrangement of ports and the latch-free baseplate, things are much as before.
The new, bigger (and 60 grams heavier) battery is claimed to last seven hours. IFixit found that the new unit is a 60 Watt-hours cell, up from the 45 Watt-hours of the original, itself supposedly able to last five hours. So there will be a boost, but we expect you’ll be lucky to even get five hours from it.
The doorless base brings new problems, too. I swapped a 500GB hard drive into my 13” unibody MacBook last week and it was so quick and easy that it wasn’t even worth writing up for Gadget Lab. The hard drive is still considered user-replaceable by Apple, but “replacement does require removing 10 more screws than on the MacBook Unibody.”
IFixit also notes that the SD card sticks out about half an inch when inserted, a little messy, and that the new combined headphone/jack socket omits a digital in connection. It also means that you can’t use headphones and a mic at the same time.
It’s apparent, though, that this is still one of the easiest Apple machines to take apart. If you don’t believe me, try replacing the hard drive on a 12” PowerBook.
MacBook Pro 13” Unibody Teardown [Fixit via Cult of Mac]
Section: Computers, Security, Software / Applications
When running on Windows, it’s usually a bad idea to surf the Internet without some sort of virus protection. For most people, this means buying software from McAfee or Symantec, both of which make billions of dollars selling security suites that include virus protection. Microsoft looks to be taking them on (as well as free alternatives like Avast and AVG) with its own free virus protection, code named Morro.
Microsoft’s Morro will have just basic virus protection services. It will most likely protect against, detect and eliminate viruses on the user’s computer. It won’t be a full security suite like Symantec and McAfee offer, but should work just as well for the average consumer. That really isn’t all that surprising, as Windows already has a firewall that arguably works well enough for most users. Windows Vista and 7 also include Parental Controls that are generally including in those other security suites. All it lacks at the moment is password protection, encryption and backup.
Morro looks to be ready for beta “soon,” but with no real date announced. To keep the promise Microsoft made when it killed off OneCare last November it needs to release Morro by the end of the year. It is a nice idea to have yet another free virus protection program, but it might suffer a bit of an image issue. There are those who believe that Microsoft is at fault for the viruses that pop up because it is the one that makes the OS the way it does. It’s very doubtful that everyone out there will trust a Microsoft developed virus protection program.
Read [Reuters]
Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
You want fast? We got fast. In fact, we can do better than that. We got faster. Super Talent, makers of SSD drivers and other delectable storage items, has shown off a 2TB SSD drive at Computex in Taipei. That’s a pretty big (and expensive) solid state drive right there, but there’s an extra surprise inside. The drive is a RAID, meaning that it can transfer data at a desk-burning 1.5 GB per second. You could copy two ripped movies from one drive to another in the blink of an eye.
The drive won’t fit in a netbook, as you can see in the video shot by our friend Sascha from Netbook news, but it probably doesn’t need to. These drives are likely to end up in movie production houses where a drive’s read/write times are critical, and sometimes even more important than the speed of the computer it’s connected to. Plus the FX houses are the people with the kind of money to pay for this — Sascha expects a retail price of around $6000.
SuperTalent 2TB PCI Express SSD [Netbook News]
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Apple (AAPL) claims that Safari 4 is “the world’s fastest” Web browser. That may or may not be true, but certainly its speedy market share gains are impressive. Apple said Friday that -1.jpg){kind=small}
