I know what you’re asking: Yet another activity tracker? But LIT tracker from NZN Labs has a big secret ingredient that most others don’t — and that special ingredient makes it perfect for action sports like snowboarding, surfing and mountain biking.
One word cropped up over and over at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, and it wasn’t “speakerdock” (yes, that may be two words; but I’m merging them here because that’s what I’m doing). In fact, the word was “Bluetooth” — a word discordant with the very idea of a dock-equipped speaker.
And yet, amid the tsunami of Bluetooth-equipped speakers at CES, there were holdouts — adherers to the Old Way of doing things, of physically connecting a device to its speaker.
One such holdout is the Aud 5, iLuv’s first speaker dock to harbor a Lightning connector.
It’s strange to think that, till now, as big a high-end audio player as Shure has had no answer to the extravagant, big-gun, flagship in-ear monitor models of its rivals — models like the Ultimate Ears 18 Pro Custom, or the JH Audio JH16 Pro.
But now they do — big time. The new SE846 extends Shure’s highly regarded SE line well beyond the SE535, previously their top, most expensive IEM.
Microscope-like macro lenses are super neat — and not just because they let you see the little hairs on a ladybug’s leg. No, macro lenses can show you a whole new world. Or macro lenses can spark (or rekindle) a love affair with photography. Heck, at the very least, they’re good for hours of amusement.
There’s no shortage of macro lenses for the iPhone: There’s the high-end Olloclip, which also comes with a fisheye and a wide-angle lens; then there’s also this rubber-band macro from Photojojo, and these magnetic specimens.
Add to the list the new Carson ML-515 LensMag, a pair of iPhone macro lenses that clip magnetically onto the iPhone 5 — pretty standard fare. Only there is something different.
Of course, I have no way of knowing whether space aliens actually had a hand in designing the Booq Boa Squeeze. I ran into a couple of Booq bigwigs in an elevator at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas once, and they seemed pretty cheery, completely normal, and not at all alien-like — too not-alien-like, considering Booq is based in Southern California (I consider myself a Southern Californian; we’re all weirdos). And Booq’s Sierra Madre HQ is suspiciously close to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories…
Anyway, whether or not of alien origin, what’s clear is that Booq’s bags are unlike any others on this planet — and their new lightweight, zillion-pocketed Boa Squeeze laptop backpack is no different.
If there was one concept I came away with from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year, it’s this: Bluetooth has quickly seeped into everything audio.
Nowhere was this more evident than with higher-end headphones; it felt like every manufacturer we visited that week had an obligatory wireless Bluetooth headphone on display.
One booth I didn’t get to stop by was Scosche’s, so I missed a chance to get ears-on with their new Bluetooth-enabled RH1060; but the details about these cans have my interest piqued.
It’s not much bigger than a (large, fat) thumb — but this PhoneSuit Flex battery has more juice than all but the very, very largest iPhone battery cases. While it’s been available in 30-pin and Android/micro-USB flavors for months, it’s now also available for the iPhone 5.
I’m not a big fan of screen protectors; partly because they’re real pain in the ass to apply, and partly because I’ve never felt like they really added much to the equation.
But if there was ever a screen protector to get me to change my mind, its Tech21‘s new Impact Shield. The company demoed its new protector for me over Skype recently, and I came away thoroughly stunned: The protector has a strange, almost magical way of protecting the screen from not only scratches but impacts — and is self-healing. It’s also applied onto a screen in a very different manner than most other screen protectors.
Assisted Touch is an accessibility feature for iOS, usable on any iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, that recreates the hardware buttons and other gestures that someone with a motor disability might need to use. It also lets other folks use the Home, volume, screen lock, wake/sleep, and multitasking bar without using any of the hardware buttons themselves.
This can be pretty handy if you have the device in a case or holder of some type where accessing the buttons is tricky or impossible, like a home-made picture frame, for example.
Sony is saying that their new Cybershot HX50V camera is the lightest, smallest 30x optical zoom-equipped camera in the world.
Seems like optical zoom is the new megapixels, at least as far as high-end point-n-shoots are concerned; it’s amazing to see the increasing zoom range camera makers are scrambling to pack into their pocketable shooters these days. For now, looks like Sony might just be the race leader.