The Gadgets Page

The iPad came out Saturday morning as my family and I drove from San Diego to Cape Canaveral to see the Shuttle Launch. Using my trusty iPhone, I determined that we’d be in Baton Rouge at noon, so I picked one up there. The line had been about two hours long, and I arrived at the tail end of it. My wait was ten minutes.

I synced it in the car outside a Winn Dixie, got it connected to my Verizon MiFi, downloaded a few apps, and synced some kids shows to it. The first thing I noticed was the awkward size: too big to really be mobile, and too small to set down anywhere convenient. It’s the same problem I had with my Newton fifteen years ago.

The built-in apps are great–better looking and more seamless than their iPhone or OS X counterparts. iCal is looking seriously stale compared to the iPad Calendar.

The available apps are even better–Pages is a marvel, although how useful it turns out to be is debatable, and the various news readers are fantastic–by far the easiest way to browse traditional news content.

Dragon Dictation [iTunes Link] works well and is free. It’s a must have for text input. I look forward to a future edition that would work as a keyboard.

Omnigraffle is an interesting fail. The app works just fine, but for $50 they should have provided their full suite of stencils. The very basic shapes they provide are a flat-out rip off compared to price of competing apps, and unless they up the ante they’ll be out-competed in short order on this platform. I want to drag and drop network diagrams as I survey new customer sites. For lines and boxes I can use a $5 sketch app. Omni Group needs to either price to the casual market or provide a professional tool. Right now they’re doing neither. As it stands, I’ll be requesting a refund.

The Video player is everything you’d expect: the best mobile video player on the market in any format. Couple that with on demand rentals and the amazing Netflix app, and you can pretty much waste the rest of your life watching movies on it. The built-in mono speaker is adequate for the backseat, but you’ll want a Bluetooth audio system for home use or headphones anywhere public.

Games are awesome–driving games are much easier to control because there’s weight in that steering wheel. Strategy games now have enough map. The 2X iPhone app magnification is awkward and pixelated seeming for utilities, but in colorful games it’s just fine, and preferable to playing them on the iPhone. The mode worked well with everything I tried except Call of Duty Zombies, where the button appears incorrectly rotated and doesn’t function.

Is it useful for business? Unlikely. If you create for a living, forget it. The onscreen keyboard is okay for the occasional email but it won’t replace a laptop, ever. For email it’s fine but not substantially better than an iPhone. For niche work where the form factor allows standing data entry there’s a real niche, but this device is for entertainment through and through.

One of the side effects of being a geek is that you like geeky things, like Star Wars, Chess, and Legos. Of course, combining three of those things together is an opportunity a mildly obsessive geek like me can’t pass up.

It would be prohibitively expensive to buy all the necessary sets to get a decent collection of the right mini-figures, but Lego’s new Star Wars magnet sets provides the opportunity to get many of the right figures without the overhead of buying full sets.

For about $180 (thanks to some Black Friday sales prices on Lego.com) I put together all the mini-figures necessary to make a “Light vs. Dark Star Wars Lego Chess Set”. MSRP for everything is $250. I put together this set using just one actual Lego set, a number of magnet sets, and one Star Wars Lego Watch.

Here are the Lego part numbers, all of which can be purchased on shop.lego.com:

(1) 6212: X-Wing Fighter (Luke parts, Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, R2D2)
(1) 2851192: C3PO Child’s Watch (C3PO)
(8) 852553: Magnet Set Storm Trooper (Storm Trooper, Rebel Pilot, AT-ST Driver)
(1) 852554: Magnet Set Chewbacca (Chewbacca, Obi Wan, Darth Vader)
(1) 852552: Magnet Set Royal Guard (Boba Fett, Imperial Royal Guard)
(1) 852715: Magnet Set Darth Vader (Emperor parts, Snow Trooper, Shadow Trooper)
(1) 852551: Magnet Set Darth Maul (Emperor and Luke parts)

Light Side:

King: Luke (constructed from Luke Pilot & Anakin mini-figs: see photo above)
Queen: Leia
K Bishop: Obi Wan Kenobi (pants swapped with Luke)
Q Bishop: Han Solo (Shirt swapped with Anakin)
K Knight: Chewbacca w/crossbow laser
Q Knight: Chewbacca w/blaster
K Rook: R2D2
Q Rook: C3PO
Pawns: Rebel Pilots

Dark Side:

King: Emperor (constructed from Darth Vader and Darth Maul mini-figs. See photo below.)
Queen: Darth Vader
K Bishop: Imperial Guard
Q Bishop: Boba Fett
K Knight: Shadow Trooper
Q Knight: Snow Trooper
K Rook: AT-SD Driver
Q Rook: AT-SD Driver
Pawns: Storm Troopers

The leftovers are: Child Anakin hybrid, Princess Leia in Slave Costume, Darth Maul/Damaged Vader hybrid, six AT-ST drivers, and two extra Rebel Pilots left over from Luke in Pilot suit and Wedge Antilles. Oh, and an X-Wing fighter and watch.

The choices of some pieces are driven by what can be purchased inexpensively: The AT-ST Driver rooks are there simply because they came free with the pawn pieces. I could obtain an “actual” Emperor as a Lego keychain, but he’d have a metal knob in his head and come glued together, whereas the mini-figures that come with the magnet sets are the real McCoy. I actually like my constructed Emperor better anyway.

I am considering demoting Han Solo to Q Knight and introducing Yoda as Q Bishop from another magnet set, eliminating the “extra” Chewbacca. This will leave Count Duku and Mace Windu leftovers.

With a little bit of Lego Know-How, you can have a full Star Wars Lego Chess Set. Not only is this a fun project to construct with your family, but it will be a workable chess game that they can enjoy for years to come. Not to mention the serious geek cred you’ll get from displaying it!

I’m quite a picky mouse user. While I bought a Mighty Mouse when they came out, it was relegated to my laptop bag as a spare. I replaced quickly with a Logitech VX Nano because to be frank, the Mighty Mouse sucked. It’s resolution and tracking was poor compared to modern laser mice. While it played nice with Macs, it simply wasn’t worth the bad tracking in my opinion, and I didn’t like the tiny roller ball. The heavy metal ballistic roller on the VX Nano was vastly superior for scrolling.

The Magic Mouse fixes all of that. It has a high-quality laser optics, high resolution, and is extremely responsive. It slides with noticeably more resistance on wood than the VX Nano, but not so much that it is problematic.

The entire surface of the mouse is a gesture track pad. Sliding your finger around scrolls smoothly and naturally in all directions. It’s so intuitive that you immediately get used to it, and once you start doing it, it’s difficult to go back to a regular mouse. Use two fingers to the right or left to go back or forward in your web browsing. Hold down the control key and the same up/down gestures zoom the screen in and back out.

The design is exceptionally sleek, with an aluminum base and a white polycarbonate top surface. There’s a tiny power switch and LED on the bottom to let you know when it’s off, and due to its thinness it travels very well. It’s the perfect accompaniment to a MacBook.

The VX Nano was by far the best laptop mouse I’d used, until the Magic Mouse, which I strongly recommend for all Mac users. The only problem with the mouse is the tape they use to stick it to it’s packaging, which leaves gummy residue on the bottom of the mouse when you open the package.

About two weeks ago, I got notice that the Powermat system was available for purchase. I went to Powermat.com, read up on it, added one mat and two iPhone cradles to my cart, and then hovered over the buy button for about five minutes. At $180, my highly impulsive gadget-buying urge was tempered, and I didn’t buy it. A week later, Powermat sent me an evaluation kit at no charge for review.

So I plugged in the charging pad, put my iPhone in the charging case, and set it on the pad. The pad chimed its acceptance, a charge LED went on, and the iPhone indicated that it was charging. Having seen Powermat’s viral video, I said (out loud, much to the chagrin of my wife) “It’s f—ing charging!”

After using it for two days, I really like it but I’m still glad I didn’t pay for it. Despite how much I love the idea of it and the clever design, my recommendation is to wait until the price is down by half overall and until they have clip-on adapters or cases for at least three devices you own and use daily.

Clever design aesthetics permeate the entire system. The portable mat is a tri-fold device that comes with a magnetically closing case. There are buttons on the mat to control sound volume and LED brightness. The universal charger is small and comes with a magnetically coupled case that holds four of the seven tips included with it. The power adapter is designed to let you coil the extra cable around the adapter and clip it in, so your charging station looks tidy. Even the boxes that the system comes in exhibit excellent design.

The only missed opportunities I noticed were the lack of a booster battery on the iPhone charge case, which would have sold me on the whole solution when I first looked at it, and the fact that the wireless charge receiver on the iPhone case protrudes about two millimeters from the case, which is annoying to my wife to the point that she’d prefer to use the upright iPod charger. I don’t mind it. In my opinion, the portable pad is a better value than the standard mat because it’s portable and I think it looks better.

The mat contains coils that create a magnetic field. When you place a device that has a compatible coil on it, it induces a current in the device and that current is used to charge the device. Powermat adds some clever engineering to detect when devices are present to shut down when power is not needed, thus saving that 20% of power that would be lost to inefficiency when no device is present.

Unfortunately, you can’t just throw your iPhone on the pad randomly. You have feel around for the (strong) magnetic field and wait for the charge sound or your device might not couple correctly. iPhones are finicky about charge power unfortunately, and about 1/3rd of the time my phone fails to charge even when the mat thinks it should be. Removing and replacing the phone usually fixes it. I have figured out that placing the iPhone quickly with a slight circular wave helps find the right spot to couple better than placing the device straight down on the pad, and now that I’ve gotten good at it, the phone couples about 90% of the time. That’s 10% of the time less often than dropping it on my iPhone upright dock.

But you don’t want to spend $180 on a wireless charger to wind up with a system that is slightly harder to use than dropping your iPhone in a dock. Now, for devices less finicky than the iPhone, such as the Nintendo DSi (Powermat Charging Case for the DSi) and most current Blackberry models (except the Storm) it works a lot better. Its included charger adapter for other devices is light enough that the magnetic field pulls it to the right spot and it works every time.

The Powermat comes with an array of plug-in adapters for other devices. But avoiding the use of plugs is the point of the Powermat, so without a clip-on adapter that stays with the device, there’s little reason to use the Powermat over any other universal wired adapter. If you think of the Powermat as a tidy universal adapter charging station system with the ability to become a wireless charging system for a few of your devices, you’ll be really happy with it. Its plug-in universal adapter can charge nearly all of the devices I use on a weekly basis, including my Mophie Juicepack Air and my stereo Bluetooth headset. Only my Sony cameras and camcorders are left without a solution.

The Powermat is exciting technology. When the initial adopters have paid back the company’s investors and the Powermat company is comfortable reducing the price to be competitive with wired universal chargers, and the number of natively supported devices is in the teens, it’ll be a compelling purchase. Until then, it’s an interesting vision of the future that’s still firmly in the future for most consumers.

I’ve been waiting for wireless stereo Bluetooth to become an “actual” reality for years now. The A2DP stereo wireless protocol was developed years ago, but has only recently become ubiquitous amongst players and computers. First attempts at stereo Bluetooth headsets resulted in ridiculously large and uncomfortable headsets with poor battery life that were expensive and poorly supported by devices without an external dongle.

This has all recently changed. With A2DP support now available in iPhone OS 3, Mac OS X, and Windows, I can finally actually use wireless headsets. So I headed down to the Apple store to look at what could be purchased retail, and after looking at the options, I came home with the Altech Lansing BackBeat 906 headphones. I paid $99.

These headphones double as a Bluetooth headset with their built in Microphones. Noise canceling is good—they’re the best Bluetooth headset I’ve used, although I may be biased by hearing the call in both ears, which I like. Annoyingly, the iPhone switches the audio source back to the internal mic and speaker when you take a call while listening to the iPhone, so you have to manually switch it back while you “hello? Hello?” the caller to keep them from hanging up.

Styled like two behind-the-ear BT headsets connected by a cable that runs behind the head, they’re actually the most comfortable wireless headphones or headset that I’ve ever used. They have a silicon waveguide that directs the sound into the ear canal from external earbud style speakers, which is more comfortable than in-the-ear foam inserts. The only usability problem I’ve encountered is that leaning your head back against a pillow will cause the earbuds to move, just as with any behind-the-head headset. Unfortunately they’re too large to fit inside a motorcycle helmet.

Buttons are provided on the headset for call hook (left side) and audio controls (right side). Play/Pause is the main audio control button, with a lever for audio up/down. Holding the up/down lever for two seconds provides next/previous track, and the controls work seamlessly in iTunes and on the iPhone. The headsets come with a Bluetooth adapter compatible with all iPods that have dock connectors (as shown in the photo). iPhones can drive the headsets directly from the built-in Bluetooth and don’t need the plug-in adapter. Bluetooth range is about the same as any BT headset, which is to say you can use it in the same room as the source, but as soon as you round a wall, the signal drops out completely.

Sound quality is quite good–the best I’ve heard via wireless Bluetooth. Interestingly, it’s dramatically better with my iPhone than with my Mac (Unitbody Powerbook 17”) running iTunes. On the Mac, there are audible distortion effects irrespective of the compression level of the music or volume. It’s hard to understand why a completely digital audio stream would be affected, especially considering that I would think the codebase and hardware between the Mac and the iPhone are quite similar. It’s clearly the Mac, however, because on the iPhone audio is clean and crisp at all volumes.

For casual listeners, the Bass is good but not booming. You’ll definitely hear the bass line in 50 Cent’s Candy Shop. The ominous sub-aurals in Batman Begins are vivid, although not as lush as with Sony’s top of the line ear buds. Brass and synthetics are bright, and beats are crunchy and pop. You’ll like these phones.

No Bluetooth wireless headset will satisfy an audiophile. Distortion, bandwidth, and compression effects are all audible, and distortion at higher volumes can be distracting. Bass response lacks depth, and there’s a general flatness and lack of vibrancy and dimension across the dynamic range, leaving horns sounding especially brassy. Noise levels during silence are pronounced, as they would be on worn vinyl. The headphones can get quite loud—maybe a little too loud, but I’ve already lost hearing so it works for me. At peak volume, the distortion can be annoying. You’ll hear noise spikes in the attack of beat transitions and compression artifacts in the tail of white noise envelopes. Distortion at mid level volumes is only mildly apparent. These effects are apparent irrespective of the compression level of the source audio files (I tested up to 320kbps on my iPhone. Even uncompressed audio had distortion on the Mac, but I’m putting that down to a problem in a processing on the Mac since those effects are not apparent on the iPhone).

Fortunately, I’m not an audiophile, so love these little gems. They’re the best Bluetooth headphones I’ve heard and they’re they ideal mate to my iPhone.

Microsoft’s latest desktop operating system, Windows 7, has been released to manufacturing, which means that it will be available pre-loaded on PCs and in retail boxes in October. Being geeks, the gadgets page got early access to the release version and installed it on the Sony UX 390N to compare Windows 7 to its predecessor, Windows Vista.

In a word, Windows 7 is a sigh of relief. The Sony UX390 is an Ultra-mobile PC, and not very powerful: It has a 1.5GHz Core Solo processor, 1GB of ram, and a 32GB solid state hard disk. It’s basically minimum spec for a modern computer. Vista ran poorly on it, and only with considerable tuning and customization by an expert was it even remotely tolerable. Application “whiteouts” were common, search indexing had to be disabled, and apps ran out of RAM all the time. Beyond using it for Outlook, there was little that it was good for. Sony should never have moved from Windows XP for these UMPC machines.

Windows 7 changes all of that. I performed a clean installation from a boot CD in less than 30 minutes, which in itself is amazing. Secondly, by the time the installation was done (with literally no input from me beyond partitioning), it had nearly all the devices, including the fingerprint scanner, correctly identified and working. Of all of Sony’s original drivers and applications, I only need to install drivers for the memory stick slot, Sony’s firmware extensions device on the motherboard, the onboard camera, and the touch screen calibration application. Everything else was handled out of the box, and the Vista drivers for the missing devices worked in Windows 7. The new Printers and Devices app is a joy—it’s way easier and faster to deal with devices in Windows using this separate control panel. In less than an hour total, I had a new computer.

It’s hard to describe how much better the computer is now. Office 2007 runs just fine—it’s quite snappy. I’ve done literally no tuning—I haven’t had to turn off indexing, add ReadyBoost, or anything else to make the computer perform. It runs just fine by default. Everything is faster—hooking up to wireless networks, running multiple simultaneous applications—everything. The fan isn’t on all the time and the hard disk isn’t constantly accessing. Features that used to be add-on programs, such as Fingerprint logon and burning ISO images to CD or DVD, are now part of the operating system.

The new taskbar works just like the OS X dock. I wasn’t a fan of the dock in OS X when it came out, but I’m quite used to it now, and it’s definitely better than the Start menu ever was. The new taskbar is faster and easier to use than the start menu (which is also still there) and the screen looks a lot more coherent. I wish they’d gone all the way and put the Recycle Bin on it so there’s not just one lonely icon on my desktop, but they didn’t.

The organization of the user interface is a quite a bit better than Vista. Vista was clearly just a bunch of silly layers on top of the old user-interface that rarely made anything easier—they just made it take longer to get to the functionality you were looking for. In Windows 7, finding your way around makes more sense—probably more sense than it ever has in the past. You can generally just find the functionality you need by looking around and clicking in the obvious places.

When you can’t, typing the name of an application in the search box in the start menu will pull up whatever you need quickly. Searching in Windows 7 is dramatically improved, although not yet on par with OS X in terms of speed and low background processing impact. It is finally good enough to use, however.

Finally, every one of the buggy glitches I’d been dealing with in Vista is resolved. File copies are fast. Drag and drop operations actually work the first time. UAC pop-ups are considerably reduced. Applications that aren’t compatible with Vista can be run in a built-in XP virtual mode in the Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions of Windows 7. But mostly, it’s just much, much faster.

I strongly recommend upgrading all of your modern PCs to Windows 7. If it runs Windows XP well, it will run Windows 7 even better. And if it runs Vista, Windows 7 will run like the operating system you were promised but didn’t get. Is it better than OS X 10.5 on a Mac? Not quite, but it is a heck of a lot closer, and it runs all your apps.

I have a Sony DSC-F828 digital camera that I’ve been quite happy with. It’s a full-frame camera with a large, attached lens that was Sony’s premier camera before they acquired Konica-Minolta’s camera business. It’s not an SLR, but it’s fine for my needs, and with its 8MP imager it’s still quite a good camera. It takes Memory Stick (MS) and CardFlash (CF) mediate types.

But I know that modern cameras have useful features like Wi-Fi connectivity that allows you to automatically upload photos to your computer and to online sharing sites such as Facebook or Flickr. I’ve also gotten quite enamored of the Geo-tagging feature that my iPhone supports for photos. So I’ve been very tempted to update to a new camera for quite some time, even though I’ve been happy with my old Sony and I’ve got quite a few accessories for it. It would be expensive to replace, to say the least.

As I was browsing the isles at Fry’s Electronics, I saw an SD to CF adapter and a plan instantly gelled in my mind: If I could fit an SD card into my Sony, then I could use the Eye-Fi WiFi SD camera card to automatically upload and Geo-tag my photos. So I bought both the CF to SDHC card adapter ($20) and the Eye-Fi Explore 4GB ($100).

The Eye-Fi is a standard SD flash memory card made specifically for cameras that includes integrated WiFi and GPS. Basically, you set the card up using your computer to associate with your Wireless router, and then put the card in your camera. When you take pictures with the camera, the photos are uploaded automatically either to your computer or to Eye-Fi’s servers on the Internet. Eye-Fi’s servers, the photos can be transmitted back to your PC whenever it’s on, and also to online photo sharing websites.

The setup was a piece of cake—you just plug the Eye-Fi card into a USB slot, run the software contained on the card that shows up, answer a few questions and create an account, and then plug the card into your camera and take a picture. The software opens a website that walks you through the process completely, all the way through to receiving your first photo. It was really amazingly easy to setup.

The Eye-Fi also worked perfectly fine in the generic $20 SD to CF adapter I’d bought. My Sony camera recognized it with no issues even though it doesn’t normally take SD cards.

I’m really quite pleased with the Eye-Fi. For about $120, I saved the $1000 it would cost to replace a camera that I’m otherwise completely happy with. With a CF Adapter, the range of cameras that can utilize this amazing little card is dramatically increased. Before you spend the money on upgrading, consider this alternative and save yourself a bundle.

Matthew Strebe’s Review:

The SKYLaser 125mW high-powered green laser is a fairly large sized laser pointer that uses an extremely high power green laser. How powerful is it?

In my testing, it’s powerful enough to:

• Cause temporary blind spots (dazzling) from the reflection. Do not point it at reflective surfaces. The FDA certifies that it is not powerful enough to cause permanent eye damage.
• See the beam. Yes, you can see the beam indoors and outdoors at night, not just the spot.
• Point to items outdoors in broad daylight that are kilometers away.
• See the spot on low clouds.
• Point the beam to stars and other astronomy.
• Damage itself if used for more than 100 seconds per burst.
• Scare away that damned crow from the power pole outside my bedroom.

The big question a reviewer has to ask, especially when they like a gadget, is why someone would buy it. Now, there’s a significant portion of gadget’s page readers who don’t need a reason to buy a high-powered laser, they only to know where to get a matching shark. But for you practical folk, here are the legal uses I’ve come up with:

• Outdoor guides, scoutmasters, and birders who want to point out plants or wildlife in broad daylight.
• Astronomy buffs who want to dazzle other astronomy buffs with their ability to point out specific stars.
• Safely scaring away birds and wild or feral animals away from a distance.

I came up with a much longer list of illegal uses, but I won’t repeat those here.

To be frank, high-powered lasers are marketed to people who need a reason not to buy them, and if you’re in that group, this is definitely the laser for you.

The laser also has a low power mode for boring things like PowerPoint presentations. $299 from Skylasers.com.

Laura Moncur’s Review:

When Mike and I tested the SKYLaser high-powered green laser, we could only think of testing it with our cat. He he enjoyed it greatly, but we were scared of blinding him, so we only let him play a little bit.

This is a VERY bright laser. Not only can you see the laser point, you can see the beam.

Warning: This laser is freakishly bright and can put a burn mark on your eyes if you look at it too much. I’m not talking turning the laser on your eyes. If you look at the laser point on the wall, you will have an afterimage on your eyes for a LONG time (several hours). It also can burn your skin if it is held in one place too long. It’s intense enough to pop balloons.

It’s intense enough to melt a credit card.

Additionally, it is a Federal offense in the U.S. to shine a laser pointer like this at an aircraft and illegal to shine at drivers of cars in some states.

So BE CAREFUL!

The Tesla Roadster pure electric vehicle is more gadget than car, so when I got the chance to drive one, I figured I better write about it. I have a client who pre-ordered a Tesla Roadster years ago, and was the first person in San Diego to take delivery of it. I drove it the next day.

The Tesla is a beautiful car—it’s the same size and shape as the now-familiar Lotus Elise and built to look like a 70’s era pure roadster. I unfortunately am far too tall to drive roadsters. At 6’5, there are many that I can’t even close the door on (Mazda Miata) and even in the largest (Mercedes-Benz SL500) I’m too squeezed to be comfortable. My daily driver is a four-seat ragtop for that reason; it’s the closest thing to a roadster I’m able to drive comfortably.

Climbing into the Tesla is a chore for that reason, although I am able to close the door and drive the vehicle. If you’re 6’ or taller, drive this car before you put your name on the list. The windshield crossbar was just above my eye height, and I had to look over it to see stoplights. I would not have been able to drive the car with the top on.

The fit and finish of the Tesla’s interior does not compare to any modern car in terms of quality—even the least expensive cars on the market in the U.S. are better built. The seats are fine, but the center console wobbled when I tried to leverage myself on it so much that I thought I’d break it, and the door rattled when I shut it. To say that I was not impressed with it is an understatement—the interior is clearly an afterthought, and seems transported from a 1971 Porsche 911 intact. Their car starts with a fairly typical integrated smart-key, but that’s the only sign of technology in the cockpit.

Starting is as eerie as any hybrid—you put the key in, turn the car on, and the dash lights come up. Nothing else happens. The transmission has three positions: R-N-D and that’s all it needs. Park is the same as neutral; there is no actual freewheeling position because the engine is always engaged on the power train.

Pulling out of a parallel parking spot is also reminiscent of a 1971 Porsche 911 due to the lack of power steering. I had a bit of a tough time of it, made more awkward by the fact that my knee took up the space between the door and the steering wheel so I couldn’t torque the wheel around properly. Moving the wheels at a stop is a chore.

That same lack of power steering is quickly forgiven at speeds above 3mph however, as it translates into a crisp and precise rack-and-pinion steering that you find only on true roadsters these days. The car handles exceptionally well because of it and it clearly has excellent weight distribution.

The lack of fit and finish is forgiven the first time you press the accelerator. The car puts you back in your seat so fast and accelerates so quickly that it makes the normal engine wind-up time in a gas-engine vehicle seem like turbo lag—There is absolutely no delay between depressing the accelerator and actually accelerating. It’s like a motorcycle above 6000rpm: Power is on tap instantly. There’s no shifting because the car has a one-speed transmission, and no skill required. Just drop the hammer and the car goes. It’s like driving the world’s fastest golf cart.

Driving is also eerie. You hear a distant-sounding electronic spool-up sound like a fan or perhaps wheel bearings, and road noise. That’s it. There is no engine noise or other car noise whatsoever.

The car does 0-60 in less than four seconds, making it the fastest car I’ve ever driven and comparable to my motorcycle in terms of acceleration. On the freeway it’s the most fun you’ll have in anything with four wheels. Breaking is just as crisp and precise, and acceleration remains on-tap. It has made me a believer in the performance potential of electric motors. They will kill internal combustion direct-drive cars as soon as inexpensive battery or fuel cell technology becomes available.

Charging takes about four and a half hours at 240VAC, and in San Diego a special meter had to be installed at my client’s home to take advantage of a night rate discount that SDG&E provides for charging electric cars. A full charge costs about $10 here, but your price will vary dramatically depending upon what you pay for electricity. The car can be charged at 120VAC but expect that to take about eight hours. A full charge nets about 250 miles according to my client, but they had not yet depleted the battery.

Overall, it’s a fun toy if you’ve got $100,000 to burn and perhaps a good daily commuter, but certainly not the only car you could own unless you’re single, short, and never go more than 120 miles from your charging station.

We’ve written about the Tesla Roadster before:

• Gadgets Page » Why The Electric Car Still Sucks

You can visit Telsa’s website here:

• Tesla Motors

I’ve always liked the idea of tiny direct-to-flash video recorders, and bought one of the first Antec video recorders available. The optical quality sucked, and I wound up giving it to the kids because it was basically useless. Every direct-to-flash camera I’ve seen since then has reminded me of a toy—poor optics, poor video quality, and VGA or lower resolution. Unfortunately, the traditional video camera makers were slow to give up other formats—with Sony being amongst the slowest. Sony’s first forays into direct flash recording were very expensive, and for HD they recorded in the AVCHD, which has received very little support amongst software vendors (including Sony) and remains painful to work with still today.

That has all changed with the Sony Webbie HD. This slick little camera costs $199 (the cheapest product from Sony I think I’ve ever seen), records in full HD, and has by far the best optics I’ve seen in video camera in this price range. The Auto white-balance, autofocus times, and color balance, while clearly not on part with my $1500 Sony HD camcorder, are far better than anything I’ve seen at the low end of the market. They’re better across the board than the JVC HDD camcorder I paid over $600 for. My only real complaint with the optics is the occasionally long auto-focus times. It can take a few seconds for the camera to find focus when aimed at distant shots with few clean-edged objects, like the ocean or distant mountains. White balance can occasionally be a little washed out in strong daylight, but again, compared to the other $200 offerings the optics are outstanding.

The construction is noticeably cheaper than a typical Sony product, but in-line with my expectations for the price point. It comes in silver, purple, and orange. It fits entirely in the palm of your hand facing away from your thumb, which can be somewhat awkward. The button placement is reminiscent of larger camcorders and is a bit awkward for a camera this small. I have large hands and it worked well for me, but my wife didn’t like the button placement. The camera comes with almost no internal flash (just enough to demo the camera) so you have to supply a Sony Memory Stick Duo, which come in sizes up to 16GB at the time of this writing. You can plan on using about 4GB/hr. for full HD, 2GB for 720p, and 1GB for VGA resolution.

The camera records in your choice of full 1920x1080p HD, 720p HD, or 640×480 SD resolutions and creates standard MPEG-4 files that can be dragged and dropped into Roxio, iPhoto, iMovie, and just about every non-linear editor on the market. Zero compatibility problems. You can plug the camera into your computer using its standard mini-USB port and treat it like a flash-card reader. There is a built-in bright white LED for lighting, and with Sony’s low-light optics it actually works better than you would expect.

The camera takes 5MP photos, but with no flash, a second or more delay between pushing the camera button and having it snap the photo, and no ability to take a photo while recording, this feature is a pointless add-on in my opinion. Don’t get this camera thinking you’re killing two birds with one stone, because you’ll be disappointed with its still camera performance.

The only significant downside to this camera is the built-in, non-replaceable 80-minute battery. It rather sucks to have a camera whose storage lasts far longer than its battery. Sony could have gotten me to buy two or three proprietary batteries and a charger had they built it with a replaceable battery. Being a geek, I noticed that the camera charges at 9 volts, so a quick trip to RadioShack for an Adapt-a-plug, 9v Battery-clip, and a 9v battery puts me in business for a full day with only slightly lower carrying convenience.

You can’t do better than the Webbie HD MHS-CM1 for a low-cost full HD video camera. It has the best optics I’ve seen in a low cost camcorder and the convenient MPEG-4 format made it a no-brainer for me. Avoid it for still pictures, and think about the low-capacity fixed battery before you buy. Play with it in store to be sure you don’t mind the button placement and handling. If those aren’t an issue, then you’ll love your small and convenient HD camcorder.