The promise of VoIP has a tendency to sometimes fall short when it comes to simplicity. After all, a VoIP solution is supposed to replace the standard landline telephone — one of the simplest communication devices of all time. Ever seen an old person work a landline? They rock those things, no sweat.
IPEVO’s ST4RT (pronounced “Start”) attempts to blend the simplicity of an old school telephone headset with the convenience of VoIP. Is the ST4RT an advanced, feature-packed, powerful handset? No. It’s a $15 piece of plastic with a volume knob that plugs into your headphone jack and your microphone jack. You hold it up to your face, sound comes out near your ear, and you speak into a little mic located near your mouth – just like the telephones of old. Hallelujah. What a concept. When you’re all done, you can wrap the cords around the handset and be on your merry way.
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Making music on your PC has never been easier – or harder. While the recording side of things is fairly straight-forward, getting good audio using your PC’s limited complement of hardware tools is difficult. Hissing, bad levels, and odd artifacts plague home recording. That’s why I like the G-Track microphone from Samson. It essentially puts a good microphone and nice line-in source in a package that is shock-proof, highly configurable and really quite attractive.
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I got the VUDU wireless kit a few weeks ago, set it up, and promptly forgot it was there — a sign of a good wireless networking product. The VUDU service (see our initial review here) requires a broadband Internet connection in order operate and, up until now, your options were to either connect the box to your router with an ethernet cable or use a wireless bridge.
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In a world full of iPod accessories, the Unison i-X5 strikes a nice little balance between price and performance. Manufactured by Australian company Cygnett, the i-X5 speaker system can be purchased here in the states with an MSRP of $249, which is a pretty good deal for what you’re getting.
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Rather than bore you with words, I chose to do a video review for the Smartparts digital frame mashup. It poops out 4×6 glossy photos and handles a variety of memory cards. The UI is simple to navigate and there isn’t a whole lot to it, so it’s perfect for anyone with any sort of tech knowledge. One ink cartridge is good for 36 prints and refills cost $20. Swapping ink cartridges was easy and took less than a minute. Photo quality is decent and the 800×600 LCD displays photos quite nicely. The only downside to these mashups is that it takes up a lot of space due to the printer and it weighs a ton. The SP8PRT retails for $279 and is available now. But I’d save your money.
What can’t Netflix do? First, they destroyed weekend trips to Blockbuster with their ubiquitous red envelopes and now they promise to destroy the postal service by totally cutting out the middle man.
The Netflix Player by Roku is the first in what portends to be a long line of devices designed to download and stream movies from Netflix. While in its current incarnation the device is fairly limited, I can firmly recommend it with the expectation that the movie selection will improve.
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The SageTV HD Media Extender is a $250 ($200 if you already have a SageTV license)box that streams high-definition content from a PC over an Ethernet connection. Supported files include MPEG1/2/4, H.264, WMV, AVI, MP3, JPEG, PNG, and GIF and if you’ve got a TV tuner installed on your PC, you can watch and record television.
It’s a nice option for fans of the SageTV media center software for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms but will newcomers find that the device offers more value than competing media extenders?
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I like to think of myself as a bit of a musician. I enjoy belting out a good tune now and again and have even been known to gig professionally (back when I was 16 in high school and thought I was Bob Dylan. This, friends, is what prevented me from getting laid until age 20.) I’m no pro by any means.
Luckily, Belkin’s TuneStudio is not for pros. It’s for mid-level amateurs who know they need XLR inputs and a good recording medium but don’t want to have to think about phantom power, levels, or multiple inputs.
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Last spring I reviewed Epson’s PowerLite Home Cinema 1080 and looking back on that earlier review I was impressed with the quality and price point ($2999) of that unit.
This year Epson sent me the new version, the Home Cinema 1080UB. UB stands for Ultra Black and this projector is also priced at $2999. So the question one would ask is: how much of an improvement (if any) is this model over last year’s model?
Epson is the biggest manufactures of HD projectors, so it’s not for nothing that Epson is the big boy on the block. It makes sense; Epson also makes the LCD panels for their own projectors. That gives them a leg up over Sanyo, Mitsubishi and Panasonic because those guys all use Epson LCD panels in their projectors.
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We first saw Tannoy’s i30 iPod dock back in January at CES and now we’ve been able to play with it for an extended period of time. Yeah, I know you’re thinking it’s just another iPod dock among the sea of thousands of iPod docks available now, but this UK-engineered dock is much different. It’s leaps and bounds above the rest. Miley Cyrus never sounded so good.
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About six months ago, I made a pretty big decision to buy a souped-up laptop to use as my primary computer. In the past, I’d been using desktop systems supplemented with an inexpensive laptop for traveling but having various files spread out between different systems finally got the best of me and, being too lazy to set up some sort of synchronization scheme, I finally said to hell with it and got a big boy laptop.
Immediately, I missed running multiple displays. Sure, I could run two displays at once but I wanted more. I’d been using two dual-input graphics cards to run four monitors with my previous setup and I missed having my writing software open on one display, Firefox on the next, my RSS reader on the third, and the CrunchGear chat room on the fourth. About to resign to the idea of two displays for life for the sake of simplicity, I got a chance to try out the Matrox DualHead2Go Digital Edition. Life was good again.
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If there’s one single gadget out there that I’ve been longing to review this year it’s the 2.1 speaker system from Razer. We caught a glimpse of them at last year’s CES and then there were teases that it would be out towards the end of last year, which never came about, but we’re getting much closer. You can pre-order now on Amazon and I’ve heard whispers that it’ll be another three weeks or so before they ship. Enough rambling, let’s get on with the review.
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