The Sonos Play 3 also comes in Black with a graphite grille. image: Sonos
I could tell what Sonos and its PR firm thought about the product as I walked in.
Festooned over a thousand square feet of penthouse atop one of San Francisco’s finest boutique hotels were samovars of fresh coffee, pitchers of fresh-squeezed juices and a banquet table overflowing with edibles under picture windows filled with panoramic views of Union Square and the San Francisco skyline. The layout was also outfitted, front-to-back, in a couple thousand dollars worth of Sonos gear — including the subject of this review, the Sonos Play:3 ($299).
The new Doctor Who Encyclopedia for iOS claims to offer everything a Who fan might need to know about the three most recent incarnations of TV’s best-known time traveller. But this is one app that could do with a zap from a sonic screwdriver: although it’s stuffed full of facts, the presentation could be improved.
Curvy. Smooth. Uncomplicated. Think of any product One Infinite Loop has spat out over the last decade or so and you’ll almost invariably and immediately come up with a few key adjectives to describe them (and if you don’t, you’re probably not reading this right now anyway).
But The Bluetooth-equipped Altec Lansing InMotion Air ($200) is pretty much the opposite of anything and everything Jony Ive and his colleagues at Apple believe in. At least, that’s true as far as its aesthetics and ergonomics are concerned; under the hood though, it packs a punch.
Our story so far: For the better part of a decade, Orb Audio proceeds to build a stellar reputation for high-end home audio with their award-winning, modular systems based around the iconic spherical speaker for which the outfit is named.
But then the iPod and its iDevice cousins sneak into a rapidly-growing number of pockets, creating a massive, swollen market that’s eager to be introduced to high-end audio, yet yearns for a more compact, less complex setup than the traditional high-end home audio layout. And what about all those computer users stuck with tinny PC speakers? Surely they deserve siren-like audio too.
So the company comes up with a solution: Take a pair of the celebrated spheres, marry them to a tiny amplifier and call it the Orb Audio Mini-T Amplifier and Speaker Package ($299): bam, instant Orb Audio experience for your iDevice or Mac!
The quality of Audio-Technica’s products is legendary, and their ATH-M50 headphones ($200) are no exception. Mids are smooth, highs are clear — and the bass rocks my ears. In fact, these guys are the cans for rock.
When Apple announced iCloud, it also announced the end of MobileMe web hosting.
If you’re among the small community of iWeb/MobileMe users who’ve been wondering what to do when MobileMe finally gets switched off next June, I suggest you take a look at Sandvox as one possible replacement.
One of the apps available in The Fall 2011 Mac SuperBundle offered on the Cult of Mac Deals page is Camtasia by TechSmith ($149 regularly/$99 introductory pricing, in the Mac App Store. Camtasia is a screen recording application for the Mac that has generated a lot of buzz over the years on the Windows platform, and has started to make some noise on the Mac front as well.
Camtasia is laden with features like simultaneous webcam and screen recording, contains a wide selection of effects and filters, and offers online video tutorials to help you through the process of putting together a great screencast. If you’ve ever wanted to put together a screencast, Camtasia is an incredibly simple — and yet powerful — tool to get the job done. But it’s not without its flaws.
UK newspaper The Independent launched an iPad app this morning, but it still needs a little work.
The free app is a far cry from the offering by The Guardian, which we raved about recently, but The Indie (as it is affectionately known by UK hacks) has had to struggle by on a tiny budget for decades. It’s not going to have the same sort of cash to spend on digital news projects.
Sadly, that shows in this morning’s newly-launched app. It’s functional, but very basic. There’s no access to an archive of issues; you get today’s paper, swiftly downloaded to your device when you open the app (so offline reading is possible).
But as a newspaper reading experience, it’s disappointing. You can’t swipe your way between articles. The primary navigation tool is an icon of a bullet list in the top left corner – tap this and you’ll see links to section front pages, and from those you can reach individual stories. The upshot is a lot of tapping to move around, which soon feels like hard work.
Stranger still, today’s launch issue shows signs of being released before it’s ready. On story pages, the newspaper’s masthead graphic doesn’t quite fit into the space allocated for it, so the line immediately below cuts through the graphic. Worse still, there are broken images all over the place, even on the front page. Teething problems, no doubt, but a shame they weren’t spotted before the app was made public.
If you’re a regular reader of The Indie and like reading news on your iPad, you’ll probably jump to get this app. But as it stands right now, there’s little on offer here to tempt people away from other news apps.
There’s nothing like wandering through the Outback, camping under the stars…with an iPad: It can help identify the constellation you’re gazing at, let you sneak in a few chapters from your latest read or track your odyssey. That is, if you can keep the thing juiced.
Solar power is the obvious choice, but there aren’t many portable solar panels with the ability to charge the iPad; add the requirement that the panel be truly rugged and your choices become very, very slim. Luckily, the Joos Orange solar panel ($150), the outfit’s first product, may be the only choice you’ll need to consider.
No doubt, leather requires some sacrifice. Those who want their iPads wrapped with animal hide usually have to make do with considerably more bulk, less usability or less money in the bank account — or, most often, all three. But Sena’s new Florence iPad 2 case ($70) is a surprising exception.
My original plan when downloading this app was to use it as the basis for a little light humor.
“Sorry readers, can’t write another word, my phone is telling me to go and kiss someone.” That sort of thing.
But after downloading it, I made a terrible mistake: I actually tried using it. It turns out When Should You Kiss is the worst thing I’ve seen on iOS for a long, long time.
Almost all mic-equipped canalphones that can be had for about $100 use moving-coil drivers to produce sound, as is the case with all the previous IEMs in this review series. But the Ultimate Ears 600vi ($120) are different — this set employs a single tiny armature in each ear. Armatures generally allow for a more neutral sound with better definition than their moving-coil brethren, and that’s exactly the case with the 600vi. In fact, this set uses pretty much the same excellent drivers as in the now-discontinued, $180 SuperFi 5vi we reviewed early last year.
And yes, apart from the V-Moda Vibrato, the 600vi is $20 more than the other earphones in this review series — but we think the extra Jackson is worth it.
Maybe you’re not going to buy a pair of earphones based on the way they look; maybe you’d rather spend your moolah on a pair that came with exquisite performance. What if you could have both? In spades? Here you go: With their deep, bone-tingling bass and blue-blood looks and manners, the Klipsch Image S4i earphones ($100) is the Prince…of Spades.
Let me begin this review by saying, while I’ve found some love for certain models, I don’t really care for most canalphones: They’re uncomfortable, and while I love the idea of plugging a foreign object into my ear and having that object deliver magical sounds just like an owl delivers a Howler, I usually wind up being disappointed with either the sound or the fit. So, with that in mind, it was time to try the Etymotic mc3 ($100).
This set, with a three-button remote on the cable and four sets of super-sealing, deep-seating eartips (two flanged, two foam), was now tasked with being tested by me. May the Force, that I’ll probably have to use to shove them into my ears, be with them.
I always feel like I should be wearing diamond-studded sunglasses, walking around in a silk bathrobe or drinking Cristal from actual Bohemian crystal whenever I sink a pair of V-Moda’s babies into my ears. This doesn’t have anything neccessarily to do with how they sound, but rather because V-Moda has a knack for creating earphones with exotic looks and a luxurious feel to them that also appeal to the other senses. And so it goes with the V-Moda Vibrato Remote earphones ($130).
So you’ve got your new iPhone 4S, and now you want to talk to Siri (and maybe friends) and enjoy some tuneage. Step one: Donate those pathetic white buds that came with your iPhone to your favorite charity, if they’ll take ’em. Step two: Get yourself a snazzy pair of microphone-equipped canalphones — earphones that fit snugly in your ear. Why? Because a good set of canalphones are the best accessory ever made for an iPhone; they’ll create a seal that will block out ambient noise while enhancing sound coming from the earphones, especially bass — which means better conversations with friends (or Siri), and better music.
Around $100 seems to be the point at which there’s a big jump in quality; also, most in that range are now equipped with inline volume controls (in addition to the play/pause and track-skip controls like the ones on Apple’s stock buds).
We’ve assembled an Apple Store’s worth of canalphones at that level, and we’ll be reviewing them over the next several days. Up first is Sennheiser’s MM 70 iP earphones ($100).
Every new Mac comes with iPhoto, which is getting better all the time. Still, it doesn’t have all of the features that are made for folks who are really into manipulating their photgraphs. Adobe’s Photoshop is often too much for the budding shooter (and cost prohibitive to boot), and image editors like Acorn – while simple to use and well-priced – don’t necessarily have the “feel” of iPhoto that many Mac users are used to.
This is where FX Photo Studio Pro by MacPhun ($40 in the Mac App Store) comes in.
The Guardian‘s new iPad app is a triumph. It’s an excellent daily newspaper in tablet form, designed to make the most of the tablet format without over-indulging in it.
I confess: when I first looked at Apple’s new Newsstand app when iOS5 was released last week, I felt nonplussed. There didn’t seem to be any content in the store that I’d want to subscribe to. I became one of the many people who tried to find ways to hide the Newsstand icon altogether.
If you like your bleepy music with a healthy dose of retro, you might like to know that right now on the iOS Store you can grab a copy of the latest virtual synthesizer from electronic music pioneers Moog – for just 99 cents.
The big question about the iPhone 4S is whether it’s worth the upgrade.
The answer is yes, and that’s because of Siri, the talking personal assistant.
Siri is unbelievable; a paradigm shift. It’s new way of interacting with computers that’s as big a breakthrough as the original Macintosh with its mouse, windows and icons. In fact, it’s bigger. It’s a much more natural way to interact with machines. It’s a glimpse of the future of computing.
Like the first Mac, it’s far from perfect. We’re at the very beginning of this revolution. But if you want to join the party, you need the 4S.
