The Gadgets Page

I just noticed that my iLive Boombox is REALLY cheap right now at Amazon and it reminded me that I never wrote a review for it. I have owned this boombox for over a year now. I bought it to work with my 1st generation Nano:

I moved on to my 2nd generation Nano:

I have also used it with Mike’s 80GB iPod Video, a 160GB iPod (pictured here).

It works with my iPhone, even though it flashes the “not compatible” warning. You can just choose “no” and use it just like you normally would.

It is a VERY versatile little guy!

If you want to carry it around on your shoulder, bothering people on the bus with it, you’ll need a ton of batteries: eight C batteries, to be exact.

But if you usually use it at your desk or by your bed, then you can just keep the battery compartment empty. When you take it with you on a trip, you can conveniently pack the electrical cord in the battery compartment.

I have used this boombox for over a year now and I’m very happy with it. I thought I was getting it for a great deal back then, but now it’s amazingly cheap at Amazon:

• iLive iPod Docking System/Boombox in Black at Amazon.com

For years, I searched for the perfect little ghetto blaster to use with my iPod. I found some speakers that sounded good, but were inconvenient to use:

• Gadgets Page » Review: X-Mini Capsule Speaker

• Gadgets Page » Review: Logitech mm28 Portable Speakers

I found a compact and easy to use set, but the speakers were less than perfect and it only worked with my first generation iPod Nano:

• Gadgets Page » Xtreme Mac Microblast: The iPod Ghetto Blaster For REAL People

I lamented about the problem:

• Gadgets Page » IPod Boomboxes: They Don’t Freakin’ Get It

When I finally found a boombox that sounded good, was inexpensive AND was easy to use, I was so happy that I used it for a year and totally forgot to write a review about it. So, if you are looking for a good ghetto blaster, you can’t do better than the iLive.

The Sony Rolly was surrounded with so many people that it was impossible for us to get close enough to it. We could see on the LCD screen above it that it was some sort of rolling, dancing thing with lights. We heard from the people nearby that it as an MP3 player. We brushed it off as silly and moved on to other things.

Jen Cody was able to get past the crowds and interview a Sony employee about the Rolly. Here is her interview:

It was released in Japan last September, but hasn’t come here yet. Here are the features:

• 2 GB MP3 player
• Two speakers
• Ability to move to the beat of the music
• Ability to be programmed to “dance” to specific songs
• Ability to upload and download programmed “dances” to the Sony social networking site

I really don’t think Sony knows what they are doing in the portable music player world. Look at their ad for the Sony Rolly.

It just makes me tilt my head and squint my eyes. Do they really think this is cool?

This is another video showing the features of the Rolly:

The fact that Sony’s booth is ALWAYS super crowded with people didn’t indicate that the Rolly was anything that might appeal to people. Most of the people around the booth were too confused to even tell us what it was.

In the end, Sony loses another round in the battle of the MP3s.

Seventeen years before Thomas Edison, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded the first human voice. Unfortunately, he had no way to play it back.

• BBC NEWS | Technology | Oldest recorded voices sing again

The device etched representations of sound waves into paper covered in soot from a burning oil lamp.

Lines were scratched into the soot by a needle moved by a diaphragm that responded to sound. The recordings were never intended to be played.

It was retrieved from Paris by Mr Giovanni, working with First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers and sound archivists who aim to make mankind’s earliest sound recordings available to all.

To retrieve the sounds scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California made very high-resolution digital scans of the paper and used a “virtual stylus” to read the scrawls.

However, because the phonautograph recordings were made using a hand-cranked device, the speed varied throughout, changing the pitch.

All of this brings to mind patent and copyright. Edison held the patent for audio recordings, yet Edouard-Leon Scott beat him to the process by seventeen years. Since Scott was unable to reproduce the sound and only made a visual representation of it, I can understand why Edison’s machine was better, but in today’s environment of patent law, I could envision Scott suing Edison over this.

Via: Shiny Shiny: Oldest recorded human voice finally played back; Radio 4 newsreader amused

I love Skull Candy’s earbuds and headphones, so when I saw their booth at CES this year, I was so excited. Their booth didn’t disappoint. There were plenty of interesting headphones and backpacks in a wide variety of colors. Their booth had many headphones on the rack so you could see how they feel on your head.

They were also showcasing their Skullcandy FMJ headsets for the iPhone and the Blackberry Curve. In January, they weren’t available yet and the staff at the booth only had one to show us, but they let us test it with our iPhone. Here are the photos that we got.

They come in a round case like the Shure headsets.

The plug fits into the iPhone and the silver color matches the frame perfectly.

Here is the microphone for the FMJ.

The only problem I had with the FMJ is the cord is made of a stiff plastic that holds its shape (as you can see in the photo). If you use your headset all the time, then the cord will hang straight down, but if you store your headset most of the time and use it every once and a while, then it will be a curly mess hanging out of your ear.

Other than that, they are perfect. Skullcandy is known for their incredible sound quality (nearly as good as Shure for half the price), so you can safely plunk down the eighty dollars for the FMJ and know that you’re getting a good headset. Fortunately, they are finally available and you can purchase them now (which wasn’t the case when I saw them in January).

It’s always nice to see a company that was doing well before continue in the same vein and create even more great products.

I love this comic from Ballard Street:

• Ballard Street – 12-17-07

The couple looks so happy sharing their earbuds. The first time I ever saw anyone share earbuds, Mike and I were in Vegas. A busload of teenage girls were waiting for their bus while we waited in the taxi line. They were all quite noisy and excitable, as only teenage girls can be. One girl had a lime green iPod Mini. I had been coveting that very model of iPod. I watched as she offered an earbud to another girl. The other girl came in close and the two of them danced to the music.

When I was a teenager, I never had a girlfriend that I would have shared an earbud with. I had plenty of guy friends that I would have shared with, but never a female friend that close. I had girlfriends, but never one THAT close.

I felt the jealousy wash over me and I wanted an iPod more than ever.

Our gadgets change us. Our gadgets motivate us. Our gadgets define us, no matter how much we want to deny it.

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 never owned a Sony Walkman. I wanted one really bad, but I was too poor to afford one. I had a Emerson tape player instead and it lasted me years before it finally started eating tapes. Looking at the photos of these old Sony Walkman’s didn’t make me feel nostalgic until I saw this one:

Those boxes were more familiar to me than anything else. I remember looking at the packaging inside the locked glass cases at K-Mart and wishing I could afford one. In junior high, the Walkman was the cool thing to have. Just like the white earbuds now, the Walkman DEFINED cool.

You can see more photos here:

• Pocket Calculator’s Vintage Walkman Museum: Sony

Pocket Calculator makes a point:

We owe much gratitude to Sony, for they were responsible for making the personal stereo cassette player a reality.

As cool as iPod is now, Sony Walkmans were when I was a young teen. What happened, Sony? Why do you hate me now. EVERY product that you have released lately has been “meh…” Reclaim your past and reclaim your territory. Make something that doesn’t suck, please…

Via: Moustache

Every time I’ve run for the last year has been with my iPod. Because the Nike+ records my runs, I WANT my iPod with me when I exercise. NekFIT is an iPod holder to use while you exercise. It can be used with all three styles of iPod Nanos and the shuffle.

• nekFIT – behind-the-neck design

For a video showing it in action, see here:

This looks pretty cool, but at 34 bucks, it’s a little pricey. I would be worried that it might fall off or get really sweaty on my neck. Cool thing is that it will work with the Nike+ without any problems. Have any of you tried this? It’s looks kind of cool.

Via: NekFit, for the Running Man – The Boston Globe

Here is the original promotional video for iPod. We had this original iPod, but only PCs, so we had to have a special cable to plug the iPod into the computer. Aside from that, the iPod was oceans easier to use than any other MP3 player that we had tried.

Sad thing is, Mike commandeered it and didn’t let me use it until he got a Nano years later.

It still works, although the hard drive wheezes and whines as if it is near death.

I’ve just come home from babysitting my nieces and nephew. We put them to bed and had a couple hours to wait until their parents came home and our iPhones kept us busy. No laptop. No television. Just Mike and I using our iPhones to watch television, listen to music, answer email and read RSS. If you had told me that I would be able to do this much with my phone back then, I would have placed the laurels on Palm, but it was Apple who finally brought back the Newton, rechristened and MUCH more useful.

Thanks, Apple.

A couple of weeks ago, PC and Pixel ran this comic:

It highlights how the gadget industry makes me feel about the HD Vs. Blu-Ray choice. Both standards are completely unviewable on my “old fashioned” television. My “measly” 27 inch screen isn’t 1080p and it isn’t even digital, so why should I care?

I like to imagine this scenario in heaven. If you have ANY answer to the HD or Blu-Ray question, they send you back. If you say, “Aw man, I didn’t go with either. After the BetaMax vs. VHS fiasco, I decided I wasn’t going to upgrade,” they let you straight into heaven.

Looks like a lot of people are feeling like me:

• False starts in race to future of DVDs | CNET News.com

At an industry conference last week, representatives from Microsoft (HD DVD), Sony and Pioneer (Blu-ray), sniped at each other over the number of copies of 300 sold on each format. Blu-ray claims its version of the disc outsold HD DVD’s by a margin of two to one in the first week. The breakdown was actually 65 percent Blu-ray, 35 percent HD DVD, according to a Warner Bros. representative.

But only when you consider that the studio sold more than 5 million copies of 300 on standard DVD does it become clear that all this posturing is over less than 5 percent of sales. On the hardware side, DisplaySearch said 5 percent of sales of standalone DVD players in September were either HD DVD or Blu-ray.

HD Vs. Blu-Ray seems like a moot point. I bet the industry sidesteps BOTH formats and goes strictly download. The fact that industry’s biggest players are feuding about this just goes to show how out of the loop they are.