| MSN's profileMSN Tech & GadgetsPhotosBlogLists |  Tools  Help |
|
1/11/2009 Words Will Never Escape You with the Pulse Smartpen As a journalist, I can vouch for how hard it is to write down every single word -- or even make sure you don't miss anything important -- when conducting an interview or listening to someone speak at, say, a press conference. And students, stenographers, attorneys, business people or anyone who needs to take detailed notes deals with the same issue. That's not a problem when using the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, which not only has a built-in voice recorder but also incorporates an infrared camera to track whatever you write on Livescribe's Dot Paper so that your notes sync with the recording. Then simply tap on the notes and the recording is played back. Plus, the paper has printed controls to start, stop or pause recordings and allow bookmarking parts of a recording or jumping backward or forward during playback. The Smartpen has two microphones, a built-in speaker and an audio jack for plugging in an included 3D Recording headset that also has an embedded microphone for recording in noisy environments, while an OLED display lets you track recording time and mangage other functions. The Smartpen's on-board battery is charged using an included USB cradle, which also transfers recordings and notes to a computer so that Livescribe Desktop software can manage and transform them into Flash movies. Now you'll never miss a single word. -- Posted by Doug Newcomb, special to MSN Tech & Gadgets Internet Radio on the Go Internet radio is great -- while you're sitting at your computer. But Slacker's G2 portable ($199.99) takes the website's easy and simple to use Internet radio service and puts it in the palm of your hand. Simply set up your service at slacker.com and choose from over 100 radio stations in dozens of genres. As songs play, you can click on a heart-shaped icon to indicate that you like a track or on a "ban" icon to nix a selection. The more you choose your preferences, the more the site tailors tunes to your taste. Best of all, it's absolutely free, although a couple of ads are inserted into the music mix every hour, and a premium service with fewer ads and more features is also available. The Slacker G2 portable connects to a PC or Mac to load your favorite stations, and it has Wi-Fi capability so that you can do it on the road. The service is also available for BlackBerry smartphones as a free download, and an iPhone app is coming soon. It's like having a personal DJ in your pocket, but without all the annoying commercials and between-song banter. -- Posted by Doug Newcomb, special to MSN Tech & Gadgets 1/10/2009 PC Peace of Mind You know you should back up the valuable data on your computer, but it's so hard to remember to do it. And when the worst happens, you always wish you had. That's where ClickFree's Transformer ($59.99) comes in. It plugs into a USB port on your computer and connects to any brand of external hard drive, and there's no need to install special software on your computer to automatically back up your precious digital pictures, music and other data on a regular basis. Just connect the transformer and it does the rest. Plus, it can be used with multiple computers and hard drives. It's a small price to pay for PC peace of mind. -- Posted by Doug Newcomb, special to MSN Tech & Gadgets Ride and Jam in Your Car With Your Favorite Star  Imagine having your favorite rock, rap, pop or country music star riding along with you in the car and calling up music suited to your particular taste, as well as turning you on to other artists you may like. That's what Gracenote plans to bring on the road with its new CarStars technology. The company has teamed with Capitol Records and Nissan to demonstrate the technology at CES 2009, which uses canned celebrity voices and images to cue up and display tunes on a car stereo. The system employs Gracenote's MusicalID and Playlist Plus to catalog a driver's digital music collection, and voice recognition can be used to select tunes hands-free. It even uses "Voice Models" to translate a celebrity's voice into several languages for use in other countries so that J Lo could, say, speak Japanese. And if 50 Cent suggests you listen to his latest discovery, you better just do it. -- Posted by Doug Newcomb, special to MSN Tech & Gadgets 1/9/2009 Will 2009 Be the Year of Connected Portable Navigation?  In just a few years, portable navigation systems have gone from a novelty to a fixture on millions of windshields and dashboards. Now that the market has reached a saturation point, the trend at CES 2009 points to a future of Internet-connected navigation systems. Two examples include the TeleNav Shotgun ($299, plus $11.99 a month for a data plan following a free three-month trial) and the TomTom GO 740 LIVE ($499 with one year of free service). The TeleNav Shotgun uses a cellular connection to download real-time traffic reports and allow Internet searches for Points of Interest (POIs) such as gas stations, restaurants and ATMs. Plus, you never have to worry about the mapping software becoming outdated since the unit can retrieve automatic updates. You can also wirelessly send an address to the TeleNav Shotgun from a PC via an icon that can be added to an Internet Explorer, Firefox or Google toolbar. The TomTom GO 740 LIVE also uses a cellular connection to warn drivers of traffic ahead in real time, and it can get gas prices and perform Google searches to look for POIs along a route. And because it has built-in Bluetooth and voice control, drivers can control the unit and call a POI without taking their hands off the wheel. This makes us think that portable navigation is definitely headed in the right direction. -- Posted by Doug Newcomb, special to MSN Tech & Gadgets Motorola AURA Will Make Your Phone the Talk of the Town  The economy may be at its worst in years, but Motorola thinks there's still a market for a bling mobile phone. The company says the handcrafted design of its new AURA handset shown at CES is "inspired by luxury watches." And it has a price to match: $2,000 when it becomes available later this year. What makes the phone so spendy? According to Motorola, it's all in the numbers: 16 million colors in a circular display that has 300 dpi resolution, a 62-carat sapphire-crystal lens, 130 precision ball bearings that drive the assisted-opening blade, 700-plus individual components that include nickel/chrome-plated outer screws and a stainless-steel housing that features chemically etched textures and patterns and requires nearly two weeks to polish. The AURA has the same coating used on luxury watches, and it features Motorola's CrystalTalk technology, which the company claims delivers "supreme clarity" and gives "deep resonance" to calls. Of course, it has all of the other features of a normal phone, such as a 2 megapixel camera, a music player and Bluetooth so that you can use it hands-free in your Bentley. -- Posted by Doug Newcomb, special to MSN Tech & Gadgets 1/8/2009 Bluetooth Sunglasses for the Ultimate in Hands-Free Cool Don't you hate it when you're wearing sunglasses, a Bluetooth earpiece and earbud headphones all at the same time? We thought so. Now TriSpec provides a way to shield your eyes from glare, take a call and listen to music, all using one cool-looking, wearable device. TriSpec sunglasses ($199) incorporate a hands-free Bluetooth headset and earbud headphones into "designer frames" and have controls for volume, answering calls or hanging up and -- when paired with a phone or MP3 player that includes Bluetooth wireless music streaming -- play, pause, fast-forward and rewind music. Phone and volume controls are on the left side of the frames, MP3 controls are on the right and retractable earbuds slide out of the tips. TriSpec sunglasses also incorporate noise-cancellation technology and are good for 7 hours of talk time, 5 hours of music listening and 70 hours of standby. They're also available for prescription lenses. Now there's finally a reason to wear sunglasses at night. -- Posted by Doug Newcomb, special to MSN Tech & Gadgets EasyBloom's Plant Sensor Uses Tech to Give You a Green Thumb  Have trouble keeping your plants alive? EasyBloom's Plant Sensor ($59.95) may be the solution to give you a green thumb and keep your plants from turning brown. According to the company, more than $21 billion is spent on new plants each year in the U.S. and nearly a third of those will die within a year of purchase. I know that my wife has significantly added to that figure. Bury EasyBloom in your garden where you want to grow plants and it will record environmental factors such as soil composition, moisture and temperature. A day later, plug the EasyBloom Plant Sensor into a USB port on your PC or Mac and it links to the EasyBloom website to analyze the conditions, recommend plants for the particular location and tell what's causing your plants to wilt. Just think of it as an electronic plant whisperer. -- Posted by Doug Newcomb, special to MSN Tech & Gadgets 1/7/2009 Bluetooth Hands-Free Car Kits that Tap the Power of the Sun The tech industry is becoming greener by promoting the recycling of used electronics, and now it's also getting involved in alternative energy in the form of solar-powered Bluetooth car kits. LG's HFB 500 ($99.99), for example, can provide 30 minutes of talk time for every three hours it's exposed to the sun. When fully charged it's good for a total talk time of up to 16 hours and a standby of up to 1,100 hours. It also incorporates echo cancellation, noise reduction, the ability to connect two phones, auto-reconnect, last-number redial, voice dialing and call waiting. Nextar is introducing two solar-powered Bluetooth car kits at CES: the NXBT-001 ($59.99) and the NXBT-002 ($69.99). The NXBT-001 offers 250 hours of standby time and 10 hours of talk time when fully charged, while the NXBT-002 gives you 150 hours of standby and 6 hours of talk time. Both include auto-reconnect, a 30-foot range, voice dialing, last-number redial, echo cancellation and noise reduction, while the NXBT-002 adds Caller ID. Next, we'd like to see solar-powered Bluetooth headsets -- with sunscreen included. -- Posted by Doug Newcomb, special to MSN Tech & Gadgets Will Consumer Tech Become the Escapism in 2009 that Movies Were to the Depression Generation? The poor economy will no doubt cast a pall over the irrational exuberance that's a trademark of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. At the traditional day-before round of press conferences here in Sin City, CEO after CEO of CE companies such as Sharp, LG and Toshiba started their speeches by referring to the tough times the country and their companies will face in 2009. But a CNN.com story today suggests that consumer electronics could be what movies were to the Depression generation: a much-needed form of escapism. Instead of finding solace in the ornate movie palaces, as in the 1930s, the story predicts that today's budget-conscious consumers will instead nest with the latest tech in their family rooms and home theaters. Experts quoted in the CNN story expect that Blu-ray DVD players and video games will capture cautious consumers' dollars in 2009. "We're about to experience a renaissance in in-home entertainment," Scott Steinberg, publisher of DigitalTrends.com, told CNN. "History proves that even during times of recession, people are willing to invest heavily in great escapes, and products that take their mind off the concerns and vagaries of everyday life." So even with dark economic clouds gathering, the tech industry looks for a silver lining at CES. -- Posted by Doug Newcomb, special to MSN Tech & Gadgets 1/5/2009 To Vegas We Go
It's that time of year again! The MSN Tech & Gadgets crew will be in Las Vegas this week for the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, the annual celebration and showcase of all things that beep and flash.
We'll be updating our CES 2009 section throughout the week with new videos, slideshows and articles from Vegas. Stay tuned!
~ posted by Jason Grotelueschen, Editor, MSN Tech & Gadgets 1/11/2008 No Flash in the PanTape is dead and the hard-disc drive may also be headed for extinction as flash memory continues to creep into more consumer electronics products. That’s the message encoded into some of the most cutting-edge products at CES 2008. Moving to flash memory offers several interrelated benefits: fewer moving parts means there’s less chance that something will break, which also means the device is more rugged and weighs less. Just consider the difference between plugging in one of those handy and portable USB “thumb” drives (a flash memory device) into your computer to transfer data rather than hooking up a bulky backup hard drive. One of the biggest flash memory stars of CES was the Asus U2E laptop computer with 32 GB of solid state flash memory onboard and weighing a svelte 2.87 pounds. Another was Canon’s Vixia HF10 “dual flash” camcorder, which uses 16 GB of internal flash memory for storing six hours of HD video and has a slot for an SDHC card for even more storage. – posted by Doug Newcomb
Organic TVs2008 may become known as the year of the OLED TV. Although the technology has been around for a while and used in cell phones, car stereos and other small-screen applications, OLED (which stands for organic light-emitting diode) displays made the jump at CES 2008 to flat screen TVs. Sony unveiled an 11-inch OLED TV, the XEL-1 (available later this month for around $2,500) that provides a staggering contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1. Meanwhile, Samsung showed 14- and 31-inch prototype OLED TVs, although the company doesn’t expect the sets to hit stores until at least 2009. OLED is poised to become the dominant flat-screen technology in the next few years—perhaps surpassing popular plasmas and LCDs—due to its advantages. OLED TVs can be even thinner than LCDs and plasmas since the sets don’t require a backlight to operate, and also produce truer blacks and consume less electricity. The Sony XEL-1, for example, is only 3 mm (0.11 inches) thick. Like most new consumer-electronics technologies, OLEDs are expensive to manufacture. But like most new CE tech, prices are likely to fall once economies of scale are reached. – posted by Doug Newcomb 1/10/2008 Stylin' StorageOne of the big trends at this year’s CES is style, as tech designers start to think outside of the black box. A perfect example of this is Fabrik’s line of Simple Tech brand external hard drives. Designed by Pininfarina, the folks responsible for styling Ferraris since 1930, Simple Tech’s Signature Mini USB 2.0 Portable Drives come in a variety of cool colors—packaged in “flavors” that include Cool Mint, Blueberry, Bubblegum and Marshmallow—and sport a smooth, velvety finish. The Signature USB drives are available in capacities ranging from 120 to 320 GB, with transfer rates up to 480 Mb per second. Fabrik claims that these are the first external drives to offer both local and online backup, the latter using Fabrik’s Ultimate Backup service, which automatically sends your data to the company’s secure servers. The Signature drives come with 2 GB of free online storage, and unlimited storage is available for $5 a month. MSRP ranges from $120 to $230. – posted by Doug Newcomb
Commuter ComputerThe in-car computer has been trying to find a place in the dash for over a decade, but every model that’s introduced ends up hitting a dead-end due to high pricing and consumer indifference. Azentek hopes that changes when its Atlas CPC-1000 hits the highway later this year. It’s a full-function PC sporting an Intel 945GM Express chipset with a Core Duo 1.83 GHz processor, a 120 GB hard drive and 1 GB of memory designed to replace factory “double-DIN” radios. The CPC-1000 can do anything a desktop can do: surf the Web via a broadband wireless card (while the vehicle is parked, of course), receive emails (which are converted to WAV files that can be read back to the driver), store and play music and movies and also tune in satellite and HD radio. Plus it can run road-ready apps such as navigation software (it comes with a GPS receiver and external antenna) and vehicle diagnostics with the addition of an optional package. All functions are controlled via a 6.5-inch touch-screen and four USB ports are on tap as well as built-in Bluetooth. MSRP is $2,499. – posted Doug Newcomb The New Golden Age of WirelessRadio is one of the oldest consumer electronics technologies still around at CES, but the past few years have seen the return of the golden age of wireless thanks to satellite and HD Radio. And Internet radio now allows tuning in stations around the world. As long as you’re sitting at a computer, that is. The Phoenix One WiFi Radio from Com One frees Internet radio from the computer. All that’s needed is a broadband or WiFi connection to access thousands of radio stations as well as podcasts on the Web. The Phoenix One has eight presets for storing stations and a search mode. Stations and podcasts can be searched by genre, country, state or city. The radio can also link to music on your home network or connect to any Bluetooth device for wireless audio streaming. The Phoenix One comes with rechargeable AA batteries with an integrated charger. MSRP is $249. – posted by Doug Newcomb 1/9/2008 Kickin' ItKicker has long been known as the brand to turn to for kick-ass car stereo. So you can bet that the new Zune dock that the Oklahoma-based company introduced at CES—its first non-automotive product— kicks out the jams. The ZK500 comes with 5-inch woofers and a 40-watt stereo amplifier, plus a 6-inch square-shaped subwoofer for solid bass. The ZK500 can be controlled by an included credit-card remote that not only allows access to the Zune’s menu functions, but also bass, treble, and auxiliary-in options. A minijack input let you jack in another MP3 player, a CD player, computer, satellite radio or almost any other source. Of course, it powers your Zune as its playing and also when the system is powered down. – posted by Doug Newcomb
Wireless SD CardAmong all of the amazing technology at CES 2008, certain gadgets fit into “why didn’t someone think of that before” category. By eliminating one simple step—having to take an SD card out of a camera and insert into a computer or card reader to upload photos—the Eye-Fi Card makes life easier. Billed as the world’s first wireless SD card, the Eye-Fi Card is Wi-Fi enabled so that it connects to your home network whenever it’s in range. Then it automatically uploads the pics on the card to your computer or to your favorite photo or social-networking website via the secure Eye-Fi Service. It handles full-resolution jpegs and even automatically resizes the pics so that they’re compatible with photo and social networking sites. The card comes with 2 GB of capacity and Eye-Fi Manager software is included for setup of network and upload preferences. – posted by Doug Newcomb
Feeling in-between? These cameras are for youI have found my next digital camera. It’s in this video with Paul Hochman. In it he’s explaining the next big thing in digital cameras, which is a category in between small and simple point-and-shoots and high-quality but bulky digital SLRs. The “ultra-zoom” category brings together the best of both worlds, perfect for a camera-toter like me. Cameras in this video:
By the way, that’s me taking the digital cameras from Paul’s hands as he goes through each product. Hello, Hollywood. See ALL of our CES video coverage back on Tech & Gadgets.
Speaking of digital… a brief conversation yesterday with Ramon McLeod, editor at PC World, leads me to believe that we’ll be seeing a lot more in digital camcorders. With the increase in products that are easy to use (especially in the area of transferring film from the device to your PC); small and unobtrusive; and, of course, high quality, don’t be surprised if you find yourself wanting to add a new one to your gadget holster. - posted by Tina 1/8/2008 A Tasty ReadTurn that messy collection of treasured hard-copy recipes into your own personal hardcover cookbook. That’s the idea behind TasteBook.com. You can upload and organize your own personal favorites to the TasteBook website, search for more than 25,000 recipes at Epicurious.com and then combine the dishes into a custom hardcover cookbook with an easy-open binder, tabbed chapters and a full-color cover that you create a title for. You can even include your own photos, or simply choose from TasteBooks created by noted cookbook authors. – posted by Doug Newcomb |
|
|
