Category: Gadgetry

Suunto has released the new line of heart-rate monitor/fitness watches that include the T1, T3 and T4. The watches are designed to be used as fitness training devices, focused around the heart-rate monitor feature, standard with all three.

The T1 is the most basic, coming in at US$100 street price. The T3 ($150) adds the ability to pair the watch with seperate function ‘pods’ like a pedometer or GPS. The T4 ($200) goes one step further adding more robust training software for serious athletes.

Ours is the T3 (pictured after the link below, right) the slick-looking one with the black face and shiny black band with the clasp buckle (that ends up costing an extra $20 over the regular T3). Out of the box, it looks pretty good but feels a little cheap – the bezel is plastic, the band is plastic, the face is plastic. Not the usual Suunto quality. But in terms of funtionality, the watch (so far) seems to justify its price… (more initial impressions after the jump)

With all of the goofy exploitations of the Universal Serial Bus, it’s nice to see a novel use that’s actually… well… useful. A UK firm has released the USBCell, a AA battery that has a charging circuit and a USB plug under the cap. It even has a built-in indicator light that tells you when charging is complete. It takes five hours to charge batts completely, so two AAs will tie up two USB ports for that period.

So far, the batteries are only available in the UK, and at 13 GPD (just under US$25) for two, they don’t come cheap. The company website has an elist sign-up for the rest of the world to “indicate interest.”

According to Microsloth inside sources, Redmond has decided to drop the anticipated price of the Zune digital media player to US$230. As you may have already heard, MS was shocked by the recent news from Apple that the new 30GB iPod would be priced at $249. They had plans to roll out the Zune at $290, thinking that would be ten bucks below Apple’s comparable player. Surprise!

So MS will now have to take an even bigger up-front hit to stay on target as being the iPod killer (or so they dream). Gizmodo surmises they’ll likely try to minimized the pricing blow by ditching pre-loads we wouldn’t have given a crap about anyway.

A year or so ago, I was thinking that there should be some way of consolidating all of the different charging adapters for portable devices, rechargeable batteries, tool powerpacks, etc. We have a drawer full of this mess. Right after this “brainstorm,” I saw a piece, in think in ReadyMade, for building a small cabinet to act as an uber-charging station. Gawd, it really DOES take a small cabinet, doesn’t it?

The items linked to here won’t solve all of your problems, but they do consolidate up to three devices (phones, iPods, PDAs) into one streamlined unit. They have a home model and a traveling one. The Traveling Power Station (shown here) is actually a respectable travel bag, with space for other gear, papers, etc. The cigarette lighter-type DC adapter allows you to charge three gadgets at once on your car’s power.

[Via Gear Factor]

iLounge has a piece worth reading called “Ten Must-Read Details on the New iPods.” Here’s an eye-opening sample:

“How much better are the new iPod screens?
Apple says that the “enhanced” 5G iPod is 60% brighter than the original, but the difference wasn’t that much more noticeable during our limited testing time. Apparently the new screens have been quietly trickled into pre-Showtime 5G iPods, and no one has noticed. Resolution of the new iPod’s screen apparently hasn’t changed from before – it still displays 320×240 resolution, despite the fact that Apple’s iTunes videos now display at 640×480 on computers. In other words, if you didn’t like the prior 5G screen, this one isn’t going to win you over, but we liked everything but the small size of the prior screen, and continue to like this new one.

“Apple’s press announcement for the iPod nano suggests that the new nano screen is also brighter than before, without quantification. We’ve seen variability in brightness in older nano screens, so it’s hard to know right now just how much better the new nano’s screen is.”

Daily Tech is reporting that a heap o’ tech complaints have been lodged on Apple’s forums since the release of iTunes 7 for the Windows and Mac platforms. Says the DT:

“Going through the Apple iTunes forum, some of the problems most frequently reported are:

* Being unable to playback podcasts
* Some iPod Nanos not being recognized by the Windows version of iTunes 7
* iTunes 7 not being able to save preferences
* Music often becomes jerky or distorted during playback
* Music becomes distorted when switching to another application in the Mac version
* iTunes 7 quitting unexpectedly
* iTunes 7 freezes during library updates
* Next track is played before current track fully finishes
* Different types of coded error messages”

Here’s a link to the rest of the DT piece.

Personally, I’m happy as a hog in swill with my copy, running on a Mac and talking to a first-gen Nano. Any Street Techies having troubles?

While we’re on the subject of Kevin Kelly and his Cool Tools e-list and website, he has a review of the Olympus VN 960 Digital Voice Recorder on his site. We covered the DM10 recorder in last year’s holiday gift guide. I still use this device almost every day and love nearly everything about it. Here’s some of what Kevin has to say about the VN 960:

“The advantages over the mini-cassette: 1) Ultra-tiny and light, it’s truly pocket size, only as long as your finger, but twice as fat. It’s only weight seems to be the two AA batteries. 2) Digital sound; the built-in mike is fantastically keen and sharp. I usually don’t need the lavaliere mike I used to use with the analog machine. 3) No tapes. I can get up to five hours in this little thing; other versions can get 11 hours. 4) Easy download. After each session I merely plug it into the USB port and it dumps the recording to my hard disk. (Has a nice MacOSX version!). 5) Best part, the files are easily scannable, and bookmarked on my computer. I find I can more readily zip back and forth through an interview to find the parts I want, rather than have the whole affair transcribed. 6) But if I want to, the files are easily transmitted to transcribers via email or the web. No more packaging up tapes. 7) Lastly, the audio files can be easily posted for general archival purposes on the web or elsewhere.”

Read the rest of the review here.

Gizmodo had a list of five recommended Road Trip Gadgets. Most of them I recognize and agree with the recommendations (we should all be so lucky as to have a Dell Precision Mobile Workstation with internal EV-DO mini-card). But one of them I was unfamiliar with and found intriguing:

“Mio C710 Digiwalker – The Mio C710 Digiwalker is more than just a highly accurate GPS device with maps for all of North America inside and natural-sounding voice commands giving you turn-by-turn directions. It’s an excellent multimedia player, with a bright and sharp 3.5-inch display that can play MPEG4 and DivX movies for you, and also handles all the MP3s you can cram onto an SD flash disk. Plus, it works seamlessly with your Bluetooth phone, giving you a hell of a good-sounding speakerphone and showing you caller ID when the phone rings, too. It’s easy on the pocketbook as well, cheaper than most GPS units at $600.”

But with this in your kit, I don’t know why you’d still need a Garmin StreetPilot (item no. 1 on their list). I mean, how lost are you planning to get?

Texas Instruments is showing off its Personal Video Recorder (PVR) tech for mobile phones this week at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam. The tech utilizes TI’s Hollywood(TM) digital TV chip and OMAP 2 multimedia processor, along with software from partners PacketVideo and Software Systems (S3).

The system will allow “people to record a TV program on their mobile phone and then watch it later, on the train on the way to work, for example. The TI package also provides “picture-in-picture” capabilities, allowing a person to watch a prerecorded program and also track a live sports event in a smaller, on-screen window.”

Do we need this? Do we want this? I know I sound like a crotchety old d00d, always complaining about the crappy mobile reception I get, but seriously, I get REALLY crappy reception, in a major market! I rarely make it through a call without it getting dropped, or with me trying to figure out where the nearest tower is so I can point my phone at it to get decent signal strength. I don’t need freakin’ TV on my mobile phone, I need a mobile phone on my freakin’ mobile phone! And I’ve had it with these mother****in’ snakes on this… Oh, nevermind…

Read the full piece at PC World.

AppleInsider dropped some pretty exciting news yesterday that you may have missed while you were trying to squeeze in one last trip to Margaritaville for the summer. It is now rumored that, besides a possible 23″ iMac and a new battle-hardened nano (with an anodize aluminum shell replacing the oh-so-scratchable polycarbonate), Steve Jobs might have a real juicy announcement for the anticipated Sept 12 Apple media event: a la carte movie downloading via iTunes and streaming of said films to your home media center/TV via an A/V version of Apple’s Airport Express. I guess this direction might explain why Apple has been so slow/seeimgly ho-hum about juicing up the MacMini to turn it into a home media computer. With this desktop-to-Airport-to-TV streaming, you don’t really need a PC in the home media center. Maybe.