Another day, another very decent 5.1 gaming-centric PC surround system. I had a chance to play a FPS with these suckers at a Logitech briefing a few months back, and for a minute I thought the back of my skull had been pierced. Full specs and press release after the jump.
And they ship in October for about $200.
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Logitech released today the latest addition to their line of Alto notebook stands. This one is, you know, cordless, and also comes with a keyboard and three USB ports for all your printer/monitor/iPod needs. Not shabby for $100 if you want to give your wrists a break from your laptop’s slimmed-down keyboard.
Considering that most people these days go through a cell phone in a time frame shorter than the human gestation period, it may be hard to believe that there was a time when phones were primarily an item you rented from the phone company.
Every once in awhile, we hear about a Renter — typically an elderly person — whose adult children discover AT&T has been charging them as much as $20 per month
for the privilege of keeping an antiquated (and usually very heavy) rotary phone in their home. In fact, as of 2006, as many as 750,000 rental phones were still ringing in the gated communities of Boca Rotan and Arizona.
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Sonos, makers of everybody’s favorite way to stream music throughout your house, has announced a partnership with Sirius. The deal: Beginning today, if you’ve got Sonos’ Zoneplayer hardware, you can download software that lets you stream 80 channels of the satellite stuff–including Howard Stern and the NFL. It’ll be free for 30 days, after which point it’ll ring up to $12.95 per month for new Sirius customers, or $2.99 if you’re already a subscriber.
Of course, Sonos already streams content from Rhapsody and Pandora, meaning that this is just one more step in their every-increasing web of alliances that could make them the daddy of streaming services. Not bad for a company that doesn’t even approach the name recognition or size of the CE giants. And still no telling what effect, if any, an XM-Sirius merger would have on this deal.
On the same note: Sirius is set to announce a bunch of new recievers later today, so stay tuned for what’s in store.
[via BusinessWeek]
The fact that Google is trying to take a bite of the Apple pie–that is, prepping a launch of its own mobile phone–is perhaps Silcon Valley’s worst-kept secret. As the rumors currently stand, the “Gphone” will come to America sometime next Spring, likely riding on back T-Mobile’s network, and, according to some reports, costing the Gguys several hundred million dollars in development costs.
So what will that money get them/us? If they want to compete in the ever-crowded mobile marketplace, which is increasingly filled with newcomers who made their name in other sectors of the tech biz, it’ll have to be plenty. Sure, seamless integration with Google Documents, Calendar, YouTube, etc… etc… etc… is a given. But here’s what we’d really like to see if they have any hope of getting us to ditch our iPhone/RAZR/Prada/wood block.
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In the 1997 film Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, documentarian Errol Morris took a look at a variety of eccentric characters whose work blurred the line between the human, the animal, and the mechanical. One of the featured characters was an M.I.T. robotics scientist who had spent his career making machines that moved like bugs.
That’s basically the idea behind Wowwee’s latest bugtastic toy: the Roboquad. It’s available this Fall, but we were lucky enough to spend some time with this beastly wonder. Click the jump to see the full hands on.
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Over the course of a couple of years, Bluetooth on cell phones went from a foreign fantasy to a crippled luxury to a standard (if still often crippled) feature on virtually every new cell phone. Putting aside the fashion merits of wearing a headset in public (an accessory that seems to be favored by an odd combination of middle manager-type office workers and guys’ whose raison d’etre is to go to as many nightclubs over the course of a night as they can), a cell phone without Bluetooth would be a joke today–if you could even find one.
So why then has Bluetooth not yet become a standard feature on MP3 players? When you think about it, the fact that virtually no MP3 players come with Bluetooth is absolutely mind-boggling. In fact, on virtually every single measure of usefullness, Bluetooth would be more useful in an MP3 player than a cell phone.
I got my grubby hands on a brand new Timex Ironman iControl watch today. Like most watches, it tells you the time. Unlike most watches, it allows you to remotely control your iPod. To get that done, you’ve got to plug in a little dongle into the iPod which connects with the watch via low-frequency radio waves. Click the jump to see full pics and review.
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No matter how cheap digital audio players have gotten, the idea of selling a disposable one-time-use one would still make most consumers shrug with ambivalence. After all, the great thing about a DAP is its flexibility–you load up what you want, when you want. You are’t a slave to album track orders, and loading up new music is astonishingly easy.
So what could Playaway possibly be thinking by selling a locked-up DAP that comes preloaded with a single audiobook and no other discernable function?
I believe in the Wii, I really do. I don’t care that it’s basically a GameCube with a white case and fancy controller. I don’t care that the graphics made the original Xbox look l33t. I just wish they would put out some decent games. And believe me, I’ve played most of them. And here’s what I think so far. And if, after reading this, it seems like there’s something wrong with every game, that’s because there is something wrong with every game.
An inside source at Circuit City has spilled the beans on company-wide price cuts on TVs supposedly coming in September. The move comes as a way of competing with arch-nemesis Best Buy. If you were thinking of making the high-def plunge and for some unthinkable reason thought Circuit City was the place to do it, wait a couple months.
So I just got off the phone with Time Warner cable. I’ve had their standard Wireless Road Runner service for four months now. During that time, our wireless broadcast has gone out for absolutely no reason numerous times (it has already gone out three times today alone). The only way to get it going again would be to call tech support and have them restart the signal. Not only that, but even though my download speed is supposed to be capped in the 10Mbps range, I would be lucky to get 40Kbps some days. Loading Google could take 5 minutes on a bad day.
Well, I finally got a competent guy on the phone today who informed us that: Oops! It turns out that the power supply that came with the Time Warner-issued router is actually pumping out the wrong voltage. The router needs a 10V plug, and they had given me a 12V one. The on-phone technician attributed my outages and slow service to this screw up. Had I not called about a hundred times, I would still be paying for a fast service I’m not getting.
So, if there are any other TW Cable Wireless Road Runner subscribers out there, check the voltage on your router’s plug. I’m curious if anybody else was issued one with the wrong voltage, and if this is perhaps a system-wide way of intentionally throttling service.
We love gadgets. And, like everything we love, gadgets piss us off. So many times, I’ve held a product and thought to myself: “This would be perfect, if only…”
The fact is, even with countless generations and web forums full of fuming fans, companies still repeat numerous mistakes. Mistakes that feel like a slap to the face of hard-working gadgeteers everywhere. For this issue of The Futurist, I present a list of things that companies should do to make their gadget — any gadget — better.
Inspired by the intrepid reporting of The Consumerist, I am calling out all current and former employees of big box electronic stores who might be able to dish on the perhaps-nefarious selling practices used to trick customers in the TV department. We’ve all heard rumors of employees tinkering with the brightness or contrast settings to make certain sets shine, but is there anything worse going on?
Shoot me an email: seth (at) crunchgear.com with the dirt. Anonymity is my middle name.
Yoga masters and scientists know it, but if you find it difficult to breathe easy, you may need to ease your breathing. It turns out that by moderating your breathing patterns so that your exhalations are long and regular, you can activate the part of your nervous system (the parasympathetic nervous system, it’s called) that allows you to stay calm, relaxed, and stress-free.
Unfortunately, most people gobble up and spit out air without any thought. That’s where the Helicor StressEaser comes in. It’s a battery-powered biofeedback gadget that helps you train your body to breath in such a way that literally blows out the stress.
I got my hands on one of these and took it through the wringer. Click the jump to see the full review…
The new E3 Lite is rocking LA. And with it, the Big 3 gaming houses have given us key glimpses into what the next year holds for them. Last year, Nintendo and their warehouse-long Wii lines stole the show. This year, expectations and standards were low enough that all it took was a couple of pieces of molded plastic to get fanboys in a tizzy. Meanwhile, Sony’s major announcement — a slimmed-down PSP — may be nice, but it reeks of the endemic problems that have plagued the company for years…
I’ve spent the past few weeks playing with Sony’s new Vista-driven Vaio FZ180 laptop. It’s thin, white, and packs a Blu-ray drive, but should you plop down two grand for it? Full review after the jump
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Awhile back, I read a story in The New Yorker about luxury ketchup. If the idea of “luxury ketchup” makes you guffaw, you aren’t alone. While customers have been knife-fed high-end mustard products for years, even the fanciest restaurants still stock Heinz. The fact is, while some products are increasingly being defined by their high-end premium offerings, there are still a few ketchups in the mix — offerings which can only be called commodities.
Of course, these ranks are dwindling. What Grey Poupon did to mustard, Dyson has done to vacuum cleaners, and now commercial hand dryers. When once a white G.E. fridge would be adequate for keeping your veggies cool, a house that isn’t loaded with a Sub-Zero now looks dated.
However, product cycles are cyclical, and it is only a matter of time before industries that were once commodities become commodities again.
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Every once in awhile, we here like to step outside of the CrunchGear Mansion. And, when we’re feeling particularly frisky, we’ve even been known to go camping. Of course, just because you’re roughin’ it, it doesn’t mean you have to be without some basic necessities. As part of our ongoing series on summer outdoorsy fun, here are our favorite camping gadgets.
Sure you’ve got a GPS onboard your boat (you HAVE a boat, right?), but chances are your yacht is missing a satellite-fed HDTV and digital fishfinder. I recently caught wind of the produce line from New Hampshire-based Raymarine, which makes pretty much everything you need to make your fishing tugboat into something Cribs-worthy. Highlight: a wearable pendant that goes “Beep “when somebody falls overboard during your booze cruise. If nothing else, it should at least help your insurance rate until you get out into international waters.
On Friday, as the entire literate world knows, Apple will release the iPhone to much hoopla. And when the mix of the unemployed and the wealthy who could wait in line on a workday to finally get their hands on their $600 box of hype, they’ll find that, for the first time, “iPod” no longer merely refers to their pocket-sized MP3 player, but also to a software program within another device.
This can only be seen as a trend within the technology industry: What were once standalone hardware items are increasingly being ported into simple software emulators–emulators that have the potential to be loaded onto numerous devices.
I’ve spent the past few weeks as the resident naysayer of the infallibility of the iPhone. And while there’s certainly a lot to be skeptical about here, there are a lot of things about the iPhone that won’t just be really neat, but could change our standards for mobile devices from here on out.
Read on to see…
To follow-up on last week’s maelstrom of anti-Appledom, my opinions regarding the iPhone have not changed: the device will eventually be pretty awesome, but paying $600 (the effective cost is closer to a solid grand when you factor in the value of the two-year contract you’ll be signing and the fact that many early adopters will likely be also fronting the bill from terminating their T-Mobile or Sprint deal) for this thing now is foolish. And it’s not just because of the potential for bugs (which is, obviously, little more than me speculating at this point), but because Apple seems poised to set the iPhone up for a slam dunk of planned obsolescence.
Read on to see why.
Feeling like your bathroom needs a wireless upgrade? The new Oral-B Triumph with SmartGuide features a sink-top LCD display that wirelessly guides your brushing. It clocks you to make sure you are moving your bristles long enough, and makes sure you get each “quadrant” of your mouth equally clean. Older Triumph models have featured the same basic built-in guides, but they were unstrategically placed on the brush handle (try reading that while the head is in your mouth.) The neatest part: If you like to stroll around while brushing and happen to walk out of range, it instantly picks up on what it missed when you get back to the sink. I just got one of these so I’m going to give it a spin and report back, so a full hands-on will be coming soon.
It comes out “very soon” and will retail for about $150.
Until June 29, it’s hard to tell too much about the iPhone, but I can tell you with near-certainty one thing: the product was almost certainly rushed to market before Apple’s engineers would have liked.
At MacWorld, Jobs said: “We’re shipping them in June”. Had the phone release date been set in July or August, the entire tech world’s collective red flag would have swung. So they set the release date as June 29 — a Friday, and the last weekday of the month. This, coupled with the fact that Apple has never, in recent memory, released a product on a Friday, should make everybody say “Hmmmm,” and suggests they took a calculated risk of releasing a product that might be a little buggy (probably about as bad as the first run of screen-flickering, case-cracking, motherboard-busted MacBooks), rather than suffer the embarrassment of not keeping their word.
Which means that when the iPhone comes, Digg will likely be full of horror stories from the poor saps who camped out at their local AT&T store, only to find their purchase was buggier than a camp cabin.
Here’s what we’re predicting will go wrong with the iPhone, and a little about what may go right.
