Category: Gadgetry

Being reluctant to max major plastic on high-def technology yet, we’ve been fans here at Street Tech of Olevia’s more modestly-priced offerings. Last year, we had the Olevia 26″ HDTV-ready LCD TV in our gift guide. The 28″ JVC TV here at Chez Branwyn is nearly on its last cathode ray, so we were sorely tempted when we saw a Black Friday Circuit City deal for a 32″ Olevia HDTV for US$499. What we were NOT tempted to do was to get trampled in line at midnight. Maybe we should have not showered or brushed our teeth for a week (this time, on purpose) and taken our chances in line. This review of the set makes it sound like it’s way worth the five hundred bones and even a good deal at its regular retail price of $900.

My latest piece on the FM Holiday Gadget Guide is a review of the Panasonic PV-GS300 MiniDV Camcorder, a 3CCD camera that offers some killer prosumer features on a vanilla consumer’s budget.

Well my wire-headed friends, CyberSanta’s databits arrived in our mainframe last night, so you know what that means: the holidaze have officially arrived here at Street Tech Labs.

Besides tapping the kegs of eggnog and making our Robosapiens do gladiatorial combat with turkey drumsticks and cream pies, this blessed event signals the posting of our annual Street Tech Gift Guide. Here’s Part 1 of our suggestions for sucks-less giving, lots of bench-tested hardware and other recommended gadgets, cool kits n’ toys that you’ll be thrilled to give (maybe even to yourself).

So Happy Holidays from all your Cyborganic, Meatbot, and Mechanoid pals at Street Tech Labs.

My review today on the FM Holiday Gadget Guide is on the Kensington 33185 Digital FM Transmitter/Auto Charger. Here’s a snip:

“When my son and I finally decided to break down and buy an FM transmitter so we could play our iPods in the car, I did what any intelligent consumer would do, I went online to read up on this type of gear and to see what the masses and tech press recommended. I quickly discovered something disappointing about it. In general, it sucks. Everywhere I went, I read tales of poorly designed products, awful-sounding audio, frequently lost signals, and the need to be constantly frequency hopping in search of an open spot when you’re supposed to be… oh I don’t know, DRIVING?”

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I’ve been seeing a number of articles recently on the power that is drawn from dongles, battery/device chargers, power supplies, and the like, even when they’re not actually in use. Cumulatively, it’s not an insignificant amount. The Mini Power Minder (US$15) is a surge-suppressing and “smart switch” outlet designed to address such issues. Plug a power strip into the bottom socket and when you turn off your computer, a USB connection to the Mini Power Minder tells it to shut off the bottom feed (killing power to all the peripherals, chargers, and anything else that’s plugged into the connected power strip). We’ve had several pieces here on Street Tech about building your own power-switching relay, but at $15, this is a cheap out-of-box solution.

This year, Street Tech is honored and delighted to be part of Federated Media’s network-wide Holiday Gadget Guide. We’ll be doing our usual Street Tech Gift Guide, but it will be in concert with Federated’s Guide. Today, I have a review of the Logitech FreePulse Wireless headphones on the FM Guide. Read my breathless review, breathless not only because I’ve fallen in love with these phones, but because I couldn’t stop shakin’ my ass after I put them on.

Reviews coming up from me in the next few weeks include the Panasonic PV-GS300 Video Camera, the Kensington Digital FM Transmitter for iPod, the LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit. and the Logitech diNovo Edge Keyboard.

Check out current reviews on the FM Guide for the TiVo Series 3, the Fossil Bluetooth Watch, an Input Device roundup, and more.

We’ll have the first installment of the Street Tech Gift Guide up within the week. In the meantime, here’s a link to last year’s guide. Since we tend to cover solid tech that sucks less, these gifts are all still worthy contenders.

The folks over at iLounge spent a lost weekend with a Wii console (gawd, it’s going to be hard to live with that name for the next few years). As usual, the Loungers do an incredibly thorough job of detailing the hardware and some of the release-day games (namely Zelda, Excite Truck, and Wii Sports (which, uh-hum, despite the name, IS work safe)). So what was their overall impression. I’ll let them tell you:

“Nintendo’s Wii is strong. Way strong. Like, “okay, we thought Nintendo had a nice new console to play Zelda and Mario on, but now we actually like the whole crazy controller thing” sort of strong. (The controller is a two-piece, fully wireless device that tracks its position and orientation, allowing you to point at the screen like a wand or laser pointer, twist and turn the controller like a 3-D steering wheel, or play games with more traditional buttons and an integrated joystick.) The surprise is that Zelda didn’t convince us. Excite Truck began the process, and Wii Sports was the tipping point.”

Read the first of the four-parter here.

One of my all-time tech journalism heroes, Walt Mossberg, gave his take on the MS Zune last Thursday. After spending a couple of weeks with it, he comes to the conclusion that, while it has some cool features, and bests the iPod in a few areas, he’s not sold on this first version.

It’s interesting that Mossberg liked and disliked most everything that I do, and I haven’t even seen a unit in person yet. Many of the things I’ve seen and felt from a distance appear to only get stronger up close. For instance, he likes the user interface and found it more attractive than Apple’s and in many ways easier to navigate. In looking at online demos, I’m really attracted to the UI as well. And people are making a big deal about it having a faux wheel (it just looks like a scroll wheel, it’s actually a four-way switch), but honestly, I don’t like the wheel on the iPod. Walt says that in many instances, it was quicker and easier to navigate the menus than on an iPod. Some of the drawbacks he found included the clunky design (as he says, it looks like a blocked-out prototype, not a final product), poor battery life (a big drawback in my book), lesser quality display than on the iPod (while the screen is bigger, it renders at the same resolution, so images appear grainier). And as I’ve been suspecting, all that “Welcome to Social” jazz (who the hell came up with THAT tortured tagline?) and the temporary song sharing appears to be a feature that sounded good at an R&D brainstorm but is unlikely something that’s going to catch on in a significant way. Mossberg had problems with the sharing and thinks it’s downright ANTI-social that the Zune desktop software doesn’t allow network sharing of music libraries like iTunes does (when my son Blake comes home from college and his PC laptop joins the LAN, I love to check out what he’s listening to and he does the same with the library on my Mac. It’s a great way for us to turn each other on to new music). And the Zune store has a goofy points system where you need to buy at least $5 worth of points to start downloading tracks.

After seeing some of the hands-on demos that have been cropping up in the last few days, I was starting to think that the Zune might be cooler than I’d thought (I DO like the look and feel of the UI and the four-way button), but overall, I think that Gen1 may prove to be more of an annoying insurgence and less of a full-fledged overthrow of the iPod. But one can imagine a serious threat within a few years.

The always curious hardware gurus over at iFixIt have done and documented an autopsy on the 2nd gen iPod Shuffle. See that little matchbook of a music player in all of its microscopic glory.

This is just mind-boggling to me. According to a piece on TechWeb, a vulnerability that was found (by the same Dutch security vendor Secunia) nearly TWO YEARS AGO in IE6 remains in IE7! It’s the one that could allow attackers to capture your data from what you think is your bank’s or other trusted site’s forms. It was news of this very vulnerability that I used frequently as an example of the sorts of security holes that IE had as I encouraged friends and consultees to switch to Firefox. The fact that it remains unfixed is just beyond the pale.

Read the TechWeb item here.