The Gadgets Page

The X-Mini capsule speaker is the solution for people who want volume from a laptop portable audio device that either doesn’t have a speaker or has tiny speakers that aren’t up to the job of delivering a wide dynamic response at reasonable listening volume.

To be honest, I didn’t expect to be impressed by this speaker—I thought it would be too small to deliver sound any better than the built-in speakers on a laptop. But I was pretty astonished by the volume, the dynamic, and the vibrant sound that was not at all brassy. The speaker has quite a wide dynamic, especially considering its size. I tested it with my Sony Vaio UX390 (which has a crappy little speaker only appropriate for Windows “bongs”) and it solved the sound problem perfectly, making the little Sony useful for movie watching.

The speaker is powered by USB but takes audio over a normal headphone jack, so you don’t have to carry a power adapter for it or install drivers to use it.

The rechargeable internal battery provides more than 7 hours of playback time when using it with iPods or portable CD players that don’t have a USB port. The device recharges whenever it is connected to a USB port, and can be charged from a USB wall adapter (like the one that comes with iPods) or USB cigarette lighter adapter (like the one that comes with iPod car kits).

The Sound is quite loud—it will definitely fill a small room—and the dynamic response is fairly good. Bass response is excellent considering the size of the device. Bass response is quite warm and not at all “brassy” like most small speakers. Distortion is apparent in the top 10% of the volume range, but that’s likely louder that you’d want anyway.

The speaker is tiny and will fit in any laptop bag with no problem—it actually takes less room than most headphones. It opens easily to expand its bass reverberation chamber, which is the secret to the bass response. You can clearly hear the difference in the warmth and volume of the sound when the speaker is opened versus closed.

The only downside is that it is a single speaker, so of course it is monaural and won’t reproduce stereo sound. This makes it ideal as a supplemental bass speaker for a laptop or portable DVD player if your laptop will play through both the speakers and headphone jack at the same time (many will not however). You can get stereo sound by using two of these speakers and a “stereo to dual monaural adapter” such as Radio-Shack catalog #: 274-375 (which is actually sold as a microphone combiner but will do the job). Don’t confuse this with a headphone jack Y splitter, which provides the same stereo signal to both ports.

The only way this device could be better would be if it had a mono jack for plugging a second X-Mini speaker into it for stereo sound (and that innovation would encourage owners to buy a second one—hint hint).

I’ve been a fan of tiny full sized computers for a long time, and I’ve had one of just about every generation of hand held computing device that has ever come along. I bought all those devices because I’d hoped that one of them would actually be useful. There’s always a show-stopping problem: The handwriting recognition can’t be relied upon and there is no keyboard, or the computer is too large, or the keyboard is external and a hassle to carry along and hook up. Also, battery life is never sufficient to spend a day on the road.

It only takes one of these problems to make a small form factor computer useless. Unless it reaches the reliability of a cell phone, I can’t risk not having access to my e-mail, calendar, and tasks.

PDAs have never really worked for me because they can’t carry all the information I need, and nobody has ever really truly solved the syncing problem. PDAs don’t have “lite” version of Visio to jot down a quick network diagram, for example. Furthermore, no PIM on the planet comes close to Microsoft Outlook in organizational functionality. My entire “Getting Things Done” methodology is based on customizations I’ve made to Outlook, and in my old age I insist that computers do what they’re for: Make my life, the way I want to live it, easier.

So when I needed a new PC to run my “Getting Things Done” methodology that I’ve implemented with customizations to Microsoft Outlook, I knew that neither a PDA nor Apple’s forthcoming iPhone would actually work for me—I’ve already attempted to get my system working on both Apple’s set of applications and the major open source apps because I don’t like having a PC just for Outlook. Syncing just doesn’t move all the information I use, and terminaling into a desktop PC from the road is too much hassle. I just want to run outlook on a computer that I can break out in a meeting to record my commitments on.

So I’ve had my eye on the Sony UX 390 for a while. I didn’t buy earlier because I couldn’t swallow the enormous price tag and I was worried about hard disk reliability in a unit I was all but certain to drop. But recent experiences have shown me that it costs more to be without my data than a one time $2500 price tag, so I took the plunge—warily, and at Fry’s where I knew I could return it within 15 days if it wasn’t going to do the job.

Out Of the Box Experience – OOBE

Microsoft has defined an “Out Of the Box Experience” manager for Vista that is supposed to make you feel a rush of serotonin and cause you to pair bond to the computer like a duckling to its mother. The initiative is lovingly referred to as “OOBE”. So, since it apparently matters enough to have an initiative and an acronym, I’ll talk about the OOBE for the UX 390.

Firstly, the initial boot and setup on the device takes about 30 minutes. Once completely installed, you are greeted with the Vista OOBE manager, whose job it is to help you get connected to the Internet and then present the wide array of crapware that comes pre-installed on the computer. There are about fifteen overlapping dialog boxes vying for your initial attention, and six or seven notification area cartoon dialogs.

The amount of crapware in the OOBE manager made me suspicious. I checked the size of the C: drive, and astonishingly, 75% (not exaggerating) of the C: drive was full. Furthermore, the C: drive was only 23GB in size, not the 32GB of precious flash memory I was sure I’d paid for. A visit to the logical disk manager confirmed my suspicion: All that pre-installed crapware required a hefty 8GB restore partition.

Normally, you’d just leave a recovery partition in place. What’s 8GB on a 200GB disk anyway, right? Oh, wait. This is a 32GB disk. And it’s a solid-state disk that I paid $600 extra for. The customer literally must take that partition off because there’s really no room for Vista, Sony’s requisite management apps, Office 2007, and anything of yours if you don’t. Leaving it in place isn’t an option irrespective of the cost or waste.

Sony placed that recovery partition there so that they wouldn’t have to spend $1 to include recovery discs. If you do the math, presuming that the Flash disk costs $600 (the price difference between this computer and its HDD based sibling), that’s $160 of your money so that Sony doesn’t have to spend $1. Thanks, Sony!

In sum, it took me 4 hours to burn my own recovery DVDs, remove the recovery partition (1.5GB of it was mandatory, and remains there still), and restore from DVD You can’t de-select any of the crapware during installation either, so you’ll waste time both re-installing it and subsequently removing it.

The initial boot and gauntlet of EULAs, web page redirections to partner sites, etc. takes an hour to slog through, then it took another 3 hours to remove all the crapware, and another 3 hours to patch it up to date an apply the Sony patches for the crap I hadn’t removed. All told, it took me a solid 12 hours before I could do anything with the device.

So on a scale of 1 to 10, the OOBE on this device is about a -5, all thanks to crapware. The only way it could have been worse would be if the device had actually been broken.

If the recovery partition were a reasonable 1.5GB in the first place, I wouldn’t have bothered with any of this. Compare that to the 30 minutes it took from first boot until my MacBook Pro had copied over all my data and applications from my old PowerBook and was up and useful. Its no wonder Apple is schooling Microsoft and Sony.

Beyond the OOBE

So the day after you buy it is when the fun begins. The first cool thing you’ll do is enroll your fingerprints in the fingerprint security manager for logging in. There’s two types of biometric fingerprint security: Actually secure, and Kid Sister secure. Actually secure fingerprint sensors do live finger detection that can’t be fooled by a Jello mold of your finger (this does) and stores your prints in the device firmware, exchanging only salted hashes with the operating system rather than storing the hash of your fingerprints on the hard disk where they can be compromised. Unfortunately, the sensor on the UX 390 doesn’t do that second part. So what this means is that it’ll keep thieves and relatives out of your data, but not the government.

Irrespective, it’s way easier than typing a password for logging on and just as secure, so it’s a big plus on a computer where you want to minimize use of the keyboard. Enrolling fingerprints is easy and smooth. It’s a slick feature, especially for a computer whose keyboard is painfully small by necessity and which won’t always be exposed to accept passwords.

The device has Bluetooth, WiFi, and Cingular EDGE network built in. EDGE is sort of “2.5G” in terms of network speed: Faster than 2G, but nowhere near the speed of the 3G Verizon or Spring EvDO networks. In my tests, the device does between 144 and 200kbps, which is basically 1/3 the speed of my EvDO card. You can call Sony tech support and get them to unlock the device for you so you can put a T-Mobile SmartCard in it to get on their much less expensive EDGE network, which I strongly recommend if you live in an area with good T-Mobile coverage because it’s much cheaper for unlimited data. EDGE seems to do much better with connections while moving than EvDO, however—at full freeway speed it kept up without disconnecting all over Metro San Diego.

Another unfortunate problem is Cingular’s crappy software. While it works just fine, the “Power Manager” provided by Cingular sucks up 15% of the devices CPU power whether the radio is in use or not, keeping the fan running constantly (which I’m sure obviates any benefit derived by the process’s name). Killing the process will let the computer idle down so the fan can stop running. I used Windows Defender to prevent Sony’s garbage from running and just wrote some batch scripts I keep in the start menu to enable the WWAN radio when I need it.

The screen is beautiful, but the resolution of the screen is so high and size so small that people whose presbyopia has set in should not even consider this computer. I love the resolution, but my older friends are unable to see anything on it without reading glasses.

The touch screen is very accurate, and quite useful. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn’t released the Vista version of Tablet PC, so you have to dig through some configuration panels to enable little niceties like tap-and-hold being used for right-click. Why this feature isn’t built into all versions of Windows is beyond me. Otherwise, the computer works just fine as a pure tablet, and the handwriting recognition is the best I’ve ever seen, interpreting my chicken scratches correctly about 90% of the time (not quite enough, but still the best ever).

Most importantly, the screen slides up to reveal the world’s first entire PC keyboard implemented as a thumb board. It works amazingly well, but you will get hand cramps trying to write the great American Novel on it. It’s for URLs and email replies, which it works perfectly well for that, and the blue backlight makes it useful at night.

The computer’s 1.5GHz Core-Mono CPU isn’t enough power to run Vista in its default configuration. You’ll notice near continuous disk access when you boot, and booting is slow. Disabling Vista’s desktop search service and file transfer compression service eliminates these problems, dramatically increasing the overall speed of the computer. I also disabled Windows Restore to improve performance and free up disk space. Properly tuned, the computer runs Vista just fine.

Docking the UX-390 turns it into a first-class desktop computer. You will want to disable the small screen so you have a bigger desktop (The Intel video adapter is weak, and won’t let you increase the resolution when driving both screens simultaneously). Additional docks are available of the shelf at the Sony store—I put one at the office and at home so I can just carry the computer between locations. The other accessory you’ll want to buy is the six-hour extended battery. With it, you can work all day without worrying about battery life. Without it, the computer will give up on you about mid-afternoon.

Once you’ve slogged through the OOBE, the Sony UX-390 is far and away the best PDA ever built. It’s small enough to wear on your belt if you don’t mind looking geeky. It’s even a reasonable desktop computer when you dock it. It’s expensive, but a worthwhile investment for people who need a real computer with them on the go.

I’ve become completely addicted to navigation systems since getting one in my car a few years ago. Sadly, I can’t find my way around without one anymore, so when I bought a motorcycle, putting a nav system on it was a forgone conclusion.

Looking at the competing units, I decided to get a TomTom Rider because it was adapted specifically for motorcycling. It comes with a mount that converts power from 12v and a cable that can be wired into your motorcycle’s electrical bus, and with mounting hardware and a Bluetooth headset designed for helmets.

The unit itself is quite servable, having all the standard navigation features and an easy to use touch screen. Just about all buttons were large enough to press with my gloves on without difficulty, and it comes with a complete set of maps for the U.S. and Canada on a 1GB SD card. The setup and configuration was easy enough that I didn’t have to crack the manual to get everything figured out. For pure navigation features, it’s pretty solid as are all TomTom products in my experience. For that reason, I’m going to focus on the motorcycle specific features of this unit.

The unit will connect to a Bluetooth-DUN enabled phone for live traffic if your phone supports it—a really nice feature. It also supports features included with the TomTom Plus service (most of which are theoretically interesting but practically useless, such as locating nearby buddies).

The system allows you to make hands-free phone calls through the navi head unit, uploading your address book and allowing you to dial through the navi while your phone sits safely in your pocket. It’s a neat feature, but one I doubt I’ll use very often since you can’t make phone calls at speed anyway.

Unfortunately, the mounting hardware was useless on my bike. As with most modern sport-bikes, the handlebars are multi-piece forged aluminum slabs, not the ¾” round handlebars of days gone by. There was literally nowhere to attach the mounting hardware on a stock Kawasaki ZX-14, so after about two hours of trying, I gave up and bought a TechMount designed specifically for my model of bike, costing an additional $80.

Once that hurdle was crossed, wiring the unit in was easy with the provided cable. Because of capacious the internal battery, it’s not necessary to wire the power up unless you intend to leave the unit on your bike all the time. The battery lasts all day in my tests, so many users will opt to simply take the system in with them and charge it on wall power rather than wiring the mount to power on their bike. It’s nice that both options are available.

The unit comes with a motorcycle specific Bluetooth headset that can be permanently mounted inside your helmet. It’s interesting idea, but it doesn’t work well in practice. The earpiece takes up enough room inside the helmet to make it a hard to get my ear in on the side where the speaker is mounted. The disconnectable Bluetooth transceiver recharges on house power—A recharging dock on the unit would have been much more motorcycle friendly, especially for those of us who tour for multiple days at a time. Finally, the unit is all but worthless at freeway speed as it is too quiet at full volume to hear above freeway and wind noise.

Unfortunately, the unit will only provide spoken instructions via Bluetooth. I would have vastly preferred a speaker on the unit that could be turned up to hear at speed. There’s not even a headphone jack, so you basically don’t have any options—it’s Bluetooth or no spoken instructions.

A better idea for a motorcycle nav system would be to forgo spoken turn instructions entirely in favor of bright LED turn indicators similar to those used for turn signal indicators, one on each side of the unit. Flashing left would mean it’s time to take the next left, and flashing right means next right. The frequency of flashing could increase with proximity to the turn, and the number of LEDs on each side could indicate whether it’s a merge or turn. LEDs would be far more obvious and easy to interpret at speed than spoken instructions even if there was a good way to deliver them, which there is not.

Another missing feature is a speedometer calibration display. It’s pretty difficult to get raw GPS information out of the unit (you have to dig through many layers of configuration screens) and there’s no single place where you can just show your latitude, longitude, heading, and speed over ground. Accelerometer features would be a big plus as well. You can enable speed display on the main screen, but a single “info” screen with a very large speed display would be preferable for motorcyclists.

Speaking of displays, color backlit LCDs are useless in direct sun, this one included, You simply cannot see it unless there’s a shadow cast on it. The display has a small sun hood, but too small to be of any real use. A unit built specifically for motorcycles would just use a high resolution black and white LCD designed for front-lighting in the first place.

In all, it’s a serviceable unit and a good navigator, but clearly merely adapted for the motorcycle market rather than developed for it. To be honest, the motorcycle enhancements don’t make it worth the extra cost considering that none of them are actually useful. Don’t waste your money on this motorcycle-adapted unit, just purchase the correct 3rd party mount for your motorcycle and use the portable navigation unit that you like best. Perhaps someone will pick up the gauntlet and make a unit truly designed for motorcyclists.

I’ve finally found a flash drive that works for the power geek: The Corsair Memory Flash Voyager 16GB. It’s fast, low power, and extremely high capacity at 16GB—more than enough for even the very largest files you may need to transfer. It comes in a novel neoprene case with a cap that makes it waterproof when closed.

With a sustained 7MB/sec write speed, the Flash Voyager is comparable to most medium speed flash devices. It’s not as fast as high-speed camera flash memory, but it’s faster than most thumb drives. Read speed is a nice 12MB/sec.

At 16GB, I can move an ISO of an installation DVD, an entire virtual machine, the largest Photoshop RAW images, entire websites, and do backups of all of my important files onto a single stick. It’s big enough to hold my entire MP3 library as well.

Another nice feature is the low power draw. I’m able to gang four of them on a small bus-powered USB hub off a single port of my MacBook Pro (which are notorious for supplying the low end of the power specification for USB) and drive them all as RAID-0 array with no external power adapters.

Next time you’re looking for a thumb drive, choose something that works well instead of the cheapest one you can find. With low power, intense speed and high capacity, you can’t go wrong with the Corsair Flash Voyager.

When I saw the Go Motorboard 2000X on a website after searching for electric scooters, I was excited. It looked brilliant: Basically the size of a two wheel kick scooter, it incorporates two counter-rotating electric motors that directly turn the rear wheel. The drive train and electronics are below the board, so you don’t see anything. I found a dealership in town, and took one for a test ride. It passed my “train station to work” test, so I bought it. The ride was really fun—about 15 miles per hour, moderate climbing ability, and it easily carries my 240 pounds.

It made the rated four to five miles (but just barely) though it did have disappointing hill-climbing ability. Basically, as with any electric vehicle, climbing hills dramatically increases the amount of energy you’ll use up, and tackling even a moderate hill on battery alone will kill the battery and leave you pushing. The wheels are wear members and will eventually have to be replaced at a cost of $20 per each. The sides of the rear wheel are impacted by the motors and slowly worn away through normal use, although I’ve been on my board for six months and have yet to swap the rear wheel. You can simply switch the front and rear wheels when the rear wheel is too worn. You cannot ride the scooter through water, both because it’s an electrical device and because water will cause the motors to slip against the rear wheel and grind notches into it. I tested it, it’s true, don’t do it.

Because it’s a scooter, you’re free to kick along with it to save energy and extend range. Complimentary kicking is basically mandatory when going uphill, and it’s not necessary at any other time except to push off (the motors don’t engage until the scooter is already moving faster than 3mph for safety reasons).

At 21lbs., the scooter is a bit heavy but it folds up and can be carried with you easily on a bus or on the train without impeding anyone else. It fits in a standard bat bag as well, which will allow you to disguise it and carry it over your shoulder. The scooter is extremely rugged—I’ve had no issues or problems with the board mechanically. The NiMH charger did go out on me, and Go replaced it immediately no questions asked. When Go released the 2000XR, which is basically the same as the 2000X but with a lithium ion battery based on the A123 cell rather than a NiMH battery, I was bummed—I couldn’t justify getting another board just for better battery life. Then I found out that Go offered an upgrade, so I shipped in my board, paid $350, and they upgraded my existing board to Lithium Ion, added shock absorbing foam, and shipped it back with a new charger. I sold the old battery and charger on Ebay for about $100 to defray the costs.

The new battery is great—it goes about twice as far and does have somewhat better hill climbing capability, although not enough to really say that you can take the scooter straight up a long hill—you’ll still need to kick. Besides the improved range, the board now weighs 5 lbs. less than it did due to the lighter weight of the new battery chemistry.

The Go Motorboard is the perfect “last mile” solution for using public transit like busses and light rail. It folds up to an inconspicuous and easily carried size, it’s powerful and has a long lasting battery, and it works even for those up to its rated capacity of 250 pounds. I toss it in my trunk so I don’t have to worry about how far away I’m parking downtown. With a bat bag, I can carry the charger with me and charge it back up at work for the trip home. Unless you’ve got significant hills between you and your destination, I highly recommend it.

At $699, you’ll definitely be able to find a cheaper scooter, but there is no better scooter available, and at today’s gas prices, you only have to eliminate one car trip per work day for a year to pay for it in gas savings and vehicle maintenance (presuming a 75 cent per mile total cost of vehicle use average as per Edmunds vehicle TCO calculator and 200 four-mile trips in a year).

The iPhone works seamlessly with the Mercedes Benz stock iPod adapter, as well as with the integrated Bluetooth MHI (Multi-Handset Interface) transceiver. In fact, the iPhone actually works better than the Motorola devices that the system was originally designed for, because if you have both the Bluetooth interface and the integrated iPod connector, you can charge your iPhone while it’s in your car without a cigarette lighter adapter. With the Motorola phones, the Bluetooth MHI adapter replaces the wired MHI cradle and prevents you from charging your phone when you have it installed.

Best of all, both the Bluetooth transceiver and the iPod integration can be retrofitted in any Mercedes Benz made after 2004 by the dealer, so if you’ve got a Mercedes and an iPhone, you’re only about $1000 away from combining the two.

The following features have been verified to work with the 2005 model year and later iPod adapter and Bluetooth interface:

• All iPod features, including in-dash song display and steering wheel button control
• Handsfree (headset profile) works through the built-in mike and speakers
• Answer/Hangup steering wheel and COMMAND buttons
• Address book upload for name selection in the navigation or stereo display
• In-dash address book name display and dial

All the features work simultaneously and the iPod will stop playing to make or answer calls. When you connect the iPhone to the iPod adapter, the iPhone will display a dialog asking if you want to enable airplane mode (i.e., shut off wifi, EDGE radio, and bluetooth) to prevent interference. It’s safe to answer “no” or just ignore it if you forget. If you answer yes, the cell phone features will be disabled.

ProClip is one of those great ideas that seem obvious—after you’ve seen it. ProClip is a mount for various gadgets that doesn’t require modification to your vehicle and doesn’t damage it. The ingenious part is its two-part universal design: You select one component that matches your car, and one component that matches your gadget. Joining the two together (with screws) creates a customized mount that fits both car and gadget perfectly.

I’ll admit I was quite skeptical when I got my ProClip: I own a car that I’m loathe to damage in any way, firstly because it’s leased and I’m not allowed to modify it, and secondly because I want to keep it nice. So of course I’ve tried suction cup solutions, and you probably know about how well those work—you wind up tossing them after a week in frustration.

The ProClip fits into two of the seams in the car’s dashboard (different ones for each car) and uses the spring tension of the bracket to stay in place. In my car, the lower shim fit between the upper console plate and the bottom of the air vent, while the top shim fit between the dashboard and the top speaker grill (the bass speaker is in the center front of the dash in my car). The lower shim was easy—it slid right in and hooked behind the place when I rotated the bracket into position. The upper shim was a bit more work: There actually wasn’t any space for the shim between the dash and the speaker grill. The ProClip came with a little wedge shaped tool to “make space” between them—hence my skepticism.

But I used it as instructed, and it actually worked. The tool did open up enough space for the top shim of the bracket to fit into, and once it was fit, it stayed perfectly in place. Putting the gadget (in this case, a Treo 650) into the clip takes a little force because it fits snuggly, but the bracket was more than secure enough to stay in place. I worried about the top clip coming off or squeezing out if too much downward force were placed on the bracket as I put the Treo in, but I couldn’t get it to happen so it’s not an issue.

Most importantly, the whole ProClip could be removed easily and didn’t leave any evidence of ever having been there. The gap between the dash and speaker pressed right back together on its own once the ProClip was removed. Now, I don’t know whether or not a permanent gap would be left if the clip was in place for a long period of time, but even if it was, the gap width is less than 1mm wide and 2cm long, and in a position where you’d not notice it even if it did deform the dash plastic.

ProClips make a great hands-free solution for your gadget, and I strongly recommend them for any device you want to keep securely mounted in your car. Your bracket will vary and I couldn’t test them all, unfortunately, but if they’re all made with the precision that mine was, you’ll be quite pleased with them.

Many vehicles even include multiple bracket locations for multiple devices. Brackets cost between $30 and $40 dollars, with gadget clips costing between $20 and $35 dollars depending on type. You’ll need one of each, for a complete solution costing between $50 and $75 dollars. Fairly expensive for a clip, but considering the fact that there’s no installation labor and it doesn’t damage your vehicle, it’s more than worth it in my opinion.

ProClip also makes a handlebar mount for people insane enough to use a gadget while motorcycling, a dual-gadget adapter to mount two devices on any bracket, a move clip kit that allows you to easily move your clip between two vehicles, tilt swivel mounts, and numerous other accessories that will allow you to get exactly what you’re looking for in a device mounting solution.

ProClips are available for nearly all cell phones, iPods, PDAs, and for some specialty devices such as GPS receivers and DVD players. Check their website for complete details.

Oceanus is the high-end dress watch brand of Casio, the famous Japanese maker of digital instrument watches. Seiko and Citizen, the other two major Japanese watchmakers, long ago gave up on trying to sell digital watches to the public, leaving the market almost entirely to Casio. Oceanus is Casio’s attempt to compete seriously against Seiko and Citizen in the analog dress watch market, and to do so they knew they’d need to make watches that were both beautiful and compelling for the $500 and over price point.

Citizen has its extraordinary Eco-Drive movements that are driven by solar energy and never need a battery. Seiko has its very nifty Kinetic watches that are powered by the movement of a weighted pendulum that drives an electrical generator. Both use low power movements (often eschewing the power-sucking second hand) to make sure they have enough battery reserve to last many months without recharging.

I’m a big fan of the high-end Japanese dress watches because they have every advantage of the Swiss mechanicals with an order of magnitude better accuracy. So of course I’ve been excited about Oceanus watches since I first heard of them.

Unfortunately, there are no Oceanus retailers in my home city of San Diego. I’ve never considered buying watches online because you can’t tell from a photograph whether you’re going to like a particular watch and you won’t be able to size the bracelet yourself unless you happen to own specialty watch repair tools. But a recent road trip afforded me the opportunity to stop at an Oceanus retailer (Modern Watch Company in Glendale, CA, who were extraordinarily helpful) so I picked up a titanium Oceanus 5-motor, which is a completely analog chronometer that is nearly indistinguishable from a Swiss chronometer except by brand.

To compete in this price category (which is also populated by Swiss automatic mechanical watches) Oceanus decided to up the ante: They’d produce a dress watch equal to Seiko and Citizen in visual detail, include solar power to eliminate the battery, and produce higher accuracy than a typical Quartz movement by automatically synchronizing the time to the radio signal put out by the Fort Collins atomic clock. I’ve always wanted an atomic timekeeping watch, but every one I’d seen prior to Oceanus used a plastic case and frankly looked quite cheap despite the fact that they cost over $150. This signal can be received over most of North America, and by synchronizing to it nightly, the watch will always be exactly accurate simply by knowing which time zone it’s located in. Or, at least, that’s the theory.

It took a while to get the watch synced to the atomic clock signal. And by a while, I mean five days. Firstly, the signal is only receivable late at night. Secondly, your watch actually has to be somewhat facing the direction of Colorado and with a clear view through a window and sitting upright. Nothing else really works. Even with those conditions on my night stand, I only receive the sync signal about every third night. More than enough for accuracy, but it takes a long time just to determine if you’re ever going to get it. And in coastal areas, I was never able to receive it probably due to thermal ducting caused by the warm marine layer.

That said, the watch is still a reasonable watch, but it’s got one exceptionally incongruous problem:

The second hand isn’t a second hand.

It’s there, but it doesn’t indicate seconds. It indicates the time zone. The actual second hand is on a small dial at the 6-o’clock position. Why? Because moving a large second sweep hand takes a lot of power. The much smaller second hand below takes far less torque to move, which is important in a low-power watch mechanism run by a solar cell. To be fair, the new Citizen Eco-Drive’s do the same thing—I don’t like it in them either.

The small second hand as an additional complication is an innovation that some Swiss Chronometers have moved to in order to increase their power reserves. But those Swiss chronometers don’t also include a hand that confusingly looks exactly like a traditional second hand. So what you wind up with is a watch that appears to be stopped, unless you notice the tiny hand moving at the 6-o’clock position. Now, I know you can get used to it, but unless this was the only watch you were going to wear, I wouldn’t want to.

They use the hand to indicate the time zone (and a few other things) in the dual-time mode. It’s not a bad idea (they have to use something, after all) and I completely understand why they thought it was a good engineering trade-off, but going against the grain of a century of watch-making tradition for a nebulous feature that could have been solved another way is a really poor design decision. People expect devices to work according to standards. We don’t want to have to re-learn individual devices. We especially don’t want to have to explain to people what’s wrong with our brand new watch.

At the end of the day, I love the way the watch works, and the accuracy and ability to automatically change for daylight savings is awesome. If not for second hand issue, I’d say it’s the perfect watch.

Product Reviewed: OCW600TDBA-7AV

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ColdHeat bills the Freestyle glue gun as the first true rechargeable cordless glue gun. While that’s technically true because they used the word rechargeable, other cordless glue guns are on the market. Disposable battery glue guns are hawked on TV, but they burn through batteries at a prodigious rate. Butane glue guns also exist, but they’ve got serious convenience problems and are rather more dangerous than the ColdHeat gun.

The gun arrived with a sample pack of low-temp mini glue sticks and a rechargeable battery, charger, and idea book. The gun is designed just like a miniature cordless drill, with the removable battery attached to the bottom of the gun handle, a two-finger trigger, and a horizontal glue chamber with a clear window to indicate when you should add another stick (which is easy to tell anyway when the trigger stops releasing glue). My first impression was that the device was both well designed and rather high-tech looking compared to a traditional glue gun. The battery attaches and detaches easily, and fits into the external charger with no trouble whatsoever.

Charging the battery took three hours exactly, and charging is indicated when the charge light stops flashing and remains solid. The first time I squeezed the trigger, I pinched the skin on my third finger between the trigger bottom and the trigger guard, which was too short to protect my large fingers. It’s easy to avoid the problem by positioning your fingers correctly once you know about it, but with the current design, everyone would eventually pinch their finger at least once. Cold Heat has assured me that they’ve already redesigned the trigger to protect against this.

When you turn the gun on (there’s a low and high temp setting, but I couldn’t discern any significant difference between them and the manual indicates that they’re essentially the same), a white LED below the nozzle indicates that the gun is on and provides spot illumination for the work area. It’s actually handier than it might seem, and is an idea they brought over from their soldering iron. Two LEDs on the back of the gun indicate sleep mode and low battery. The gun goes to sleep and begins cooling off after 10 minutes of inactivity, and immediately begins reheating when moved.

The gun heats up and is ready to use in about a minute—considerably faster than any other glue gun I’ve used, and so fast that it’s basically ready as soon as you’re prepared to use it—a major convenience. It uses standard low-temp or multi-temp mini glue sticks, and as with any low-temp gun, the working temperature is a tradeoff—it heats quickly, cures quickly, and can’t burn you, but it doesn’t flow as smoothly as high-temp glue, and you’ll deal with spider-webbing quite a bit more than you will with a high-temp gun. And you’ll go through mini sticks much faster than you would with the standard size—a typical shoe repair for example will probably take an entire stick, for example. These tradeoffs are typical of all low-temp mini glue guns.

The gun works really well, but it doesn’t heat the glue quite as quickly as a traditional corded gun. This makes for slightly harder triggering and slightly slower dispensing, but it’s not enough to be annoying or problematic. You wouldn’t notice if you didn’t have a corded gun to compare it to, but you can’t burn yourself with this gun the way you will with a high-temp gun.

The battery lasts about 45 minutes on a charge, which is more than long enough for typical around-the-house hobby and repair work. Unfortunately, it takes longer to charge a battery than the battery lasts, so you can’t work continuously by swapping batteries between the gun and charger. If you need to work longer than 40 minutes at a time, you’re better off with a corded glue gun.

The gun has a swing-out wire stand similar to all glue guns, and like all glue guns, it’s a bit drippy from the nozzle when it sits on the stand. It would be nice if the bottom of the battery were flat so the gun could stand on it reliably, but there’s a strength member on the outside plastic that makes the gun somewhat wobbly when standing on the handle. That’s too bad, because the gun doesn’t drip when the nozzle is pointing up the way it can when it’s on the swing-out wire front stand. I put sticky rubber feet on the bottom, which worked well to stabilize the gun while standing on the handle.

Overall, this is an excellent glue gun. The cordless portability and useful battery life provides far more utility than a typical glue gun. You’ll start finding uses for it well beyond what you typically use a glue gun for because it doesn’t have the setup and warm-up time hassles that you have with a traditional glue gun. It’s basically carefree. The only thing that could make it better are a run time equal to or longer than the charge time so that you could work continuously by swapping batteries, and a flat-bottomed battery to support the gun on the handle. It’s a great product.

When Nintendo released the DS (Dual Screen) as a response to the PSP, I thought: “They’ve lost it. They don’t understand that their core market is ten year olds who need a cheap, small, rugged game player, not 30 year olds who can afford a delicate $300 toy.” Well, the Game Boy micro shows that they’ve figured that out. After struggling to attract developers and sell the DS for six months, Nintendo has switched tracks and come out with what may be the perfect casual game playing device for grown ups.

At $99, it’s cheap enough for a casual purchase. About the size of an iPod Nano (but twice as thick), the GBA Micro is literally as small as a device could be and still allow me to play it. It’s the same hardware as the Game Boy Advance SP and plays all Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color games. The only difference is that it’s about 1/3 the size and weight. GBA cartridges fit entirely inside the device (the slot occupies about 1/3 of the volume of the device). Battery life is about as good as a GBA SP, surprisingly. The replaceable faceplates are a brilliant idea—no more worry about scratches ruining your device. If the iPod nano had replaceable faceplates, Apple wouldn’t have egg on their face right now over the scratching problem.

My wife instantly adopted the micro—it fits in her purse and pocket easily. While the kids like it, the form factor isn’t nearly as important to them, and frankly the GBA SP is quite a bit sturdier. So I’d consider the Game Boy Micro to be the player for the kid in every adult. It’s small enough to carry with you and play without attracting too much attention.