hardware - page 27

The iPhone 4’s reception issues may get all the press, but there may be another big issue when it comes to iOS 4: a growing number of users are reporting that upon upgrading any iPhone to iOS 4, the performance and audio quality of Bluetooth headsets is vastly degraded.

The symptoms vary, but are usually reported as sounding “muffled,” “like you’re in a tunnel” or “far away” when using a Bluetooth headset with any iOS 4 device.

Users are also reporting significant issues over at the Jawbone forums, prompting a Jawbone spokesperson to comment:

We are aware of and concerned with the user frustration surrounding the issues affecting all Bluetooth devices (headsets, car kits, and speakers) connecting to the iPhone 4 and iOS4 updated phones. We know users have come to expect the freedom of hands-free and we are working night and day with our partners, Apple and AT&T, to resolve the issues as quickly as possible.”

Way too little, way too late: speaking at the opening keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told his audience that we should expect Windows 7 tablet computers “sometime before the end of this year.”

“We know you really want to know what’s coming,” said Ballmer. “[Tablets] will come from the people you would expect. From Asus, from Dell, from Samsung, from Toshiba, from Sony.”

Microsoft just doesn’t get it. Their business is software, so it’s understandable they are focusing on selling a tablet operating system instead of a single iPad-challenging tablet themselves (even if that business model is so stagnant that it has directly contributed to the death of possibly revolutionary products).

The problem is: Windows 7, as an operating system, isn’t capable of taking on iOS. One was built from the ground-up to support multitouch; the other is a bad hackjob rlaid on top of a desktop operating system.

HP knows full well that Windows 7 isn’t up to the job of taking on iOS: that’s why they killed the Windows 7 Slate and purchased Palm’s mobile, multitouch operating system, webOS. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft’s other hardware partners get the same memo.

At the end of the day, Microsoft is going to enter the slate arena several years late, just like they did with Windows Phone 7. How can a company this hopelessly entrenched in the business models of the past hope to survive when the likes of Google and Apple are swimming in the same waters, faster, stronger and smarter?

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A lot has been made of the iPhone 4’s incredible Retina Display, but the handset’s unprecedented screen clarity won’t do you any favors if you’re blind.

Even so, it seems like iOS might be built from the ground-up to support blind users, as this video from musician Victor Tsaran reveals: he was able to effortlessly pair his iPhone 4 with a Bluetooth Braillant 32 display. Coupled with iOS’ innate (and somewhat hyperactive) voice-over accessibility feature, Victor is able to easily take advantage of most of his iPhone 4’s core functionality. Now that’s an attention to detail.

[via Gadget Lab]

Noise-canceling ear buds deliver impressively clear sound, but at the expense of the added bulk of the in-line noise canceling unit. Blackbox’s latest i10 Noise Canceling Earphones get rid of the bulk, though, by getting rid of the usual bulk-adding battery housed in the noise-canceling unit. They’ve accomplished this by also ditching the traditional 3.5mm headphone jack; instead, the i10s use an Apple 30 pin dock connector which allows these earbuds to draw power directly from your iPhone or iPod.

That makes these $125 earbuds something of a gamble, since they’ll only work with Apple’s audio players…and even then, only as long as Apple sticks with its current 30-pin connector format.

Research in Motion has long been rumored to be working on their own BlackBerry-powered tablet, often christened the BlackTab, but a new report by Rodman & Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar is now dusting off that rumor in a new report.

What are we looking at, according to Kumar? Something more akin to Dell’s recent tablet offerings in the Streak than the iPad: expect a 7-inch touchscreen, a Marvell processor and 3G baseband, as well as front and back-facing cameras for videoconferencing.

The most interesting detail of Kumar’s report, though, might be in the dating: although earlier rumors about the BlackTab pegged it for an early 2011 release, Kumar says that RIM is straining to get it out there by the end of the year.

As unusual as it is to find an electronic gadget manufactured in the U.S. these days, it’s even more unusual for that gadget to hail from New York City — but that’s exactly where Grado’s SR60i is made. Appropriate, because just like the city, these cans have an unpolished-but-genuine persona that’s a little off-putting at first, but incredibly charming once you get past the gritty exterior.

If you’re looking for an unconventional portable hard drive with the aesthetic of a West Coast Chopper, Iomega’s new Skin drives might fit your requirements: each 500GB drive comes with a unique design that, according to the Press Release, screams “Who says portable storage has to be boring?”

Or, depending on your tastes, even palatable. Looking beyond the skins, though, you can expect fast 2.5″ drives and Iomega’s Mac-friendly Protection Suite, including a 12 month subscription to Trend Micro Smart Surfing for the Mac, Iomega QuikProtext and Retrospect Express backup software, and MozyHome cloud storage.

You can buy a cheap dashboard mount for your iPhone for as little as $10 bucks, but if you take your phone seriously as a replacement for your GPS unit, you might want to consider Magellan’s new iPhone car kit.

Compatible with all iPhone and iPod Touch models, the Magellan Premium Car Kit features an adjustable dash mount, a built-in speaker and noise-canceling microphone and even a GPS receiver to boost your iPhone’s signal. It’s compatible with all iOS GPS navigation applications, and it’ll even accommodate most cases without fretting.

It costs $130, which is certainly pricier than most, but then again, most dash mounts don’t have this volume of functionality. If you’re serious about GPS, the Magellan Premium Car Kit looks like money well spent.

[via Crunchgear]

The iPhone 4 already takes some of the best smartphone snapshots around, but it’s no match for a DSLR. No worry, though: the guys over at Hypebeast just paired the iPhone 4 with a DSLR lens through a Manfrotto pocket tripod mount.

The end result? Probably worse photos than the iPhone 4 took before. But until smartphones get DSLR-style CMOSes (improbable until someone figures out how to shrink a CMOS without making the pixels less sensitive to light) and lenses (pfft), this kind of Frankenstein rig is probably the most that serious iPhone 4 shutterbugs can hope for.

Verizon understandably relishes the opportunity to kick AT&T and the iPhone whenever they possibly can, so it’s no surprise that their latest full-page ad in The New York Times this week for their upcoming flagship Android device, the Droid X, openly mocks the iPhone 4’s death grip issue with one choice line: “And most importantly, [The Droid X] comes with a double antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like and use it just about anywhere to make calls.”

Ouch.

[via MacWorld]

Although the iPhone 4’s reception issues get all the press attention, the iPhone 4 has another pressing issue: the tendency of the proximity sensor to misread how close your face is to the handset, which can in turn cause the touchscreen to turn on when it’s close to your face, allowing your chin or cheek the unfortunate liberty of blindly dialing or even hanging up during a call.

The proximity sensor issues are commonly theorized to be a software issue, but according to an Apple Store Genius spoken to by TUAW’s Aron Trimble, we may be looking at another design flaw.

Why? According to the Genius, Apple had to move the proximity sensor location in the iPhone 4 so that it actually points into the ear canal during a call. That means that if you have particularly glistening ear canals, light bouncing around the ear canal can mistakenly tell the proximity sensor that you’re no longer on a call.

The Genius’ recommendation on how to fix the issue? He said that you should make your calls from somewhere darker.

If you want to give your MacBook more of the oomph of a desktop, the DeskBook Pro dock from Zemno would be a neat little solution… except for its mind-boggling expensiveness.

Like most laptop docking stations, the DeskBook primarily functions as a port multiplier: slot your MacBook in and you’ll expand your available USB 2 ports to six, as well as two FireWire 800 and one FireWire 400 ports.

The DeskBook Pro also operates as an external hard drive, with two bays that can accept either a 500GB hard drive or a battery. Don’t expect the battery to juice your MacBook, though: it’ll only power the DeskBook away from a power outlet.

Additionally, the DeskBook packs a DVI-out port for the connection of a third monitor to your MacBook. The important thing to note here, though, is this monitor will be driven by USB, so you’ll want to go light on it: it won’t hold up to more performance-intensive tasks.

Not a bad array of functionality, all told, but the price is enough to prevent this from being dropped in many shopping carts: $600 without the $180 hard drive or $150 battery pack. If you want a desktop that bad, at that price, you might as well just buy an iMac.

Superficially, the iPad’s incredible multi-touch screen has a lot of potential for graphic artists, but in reality, the lack of a stylus and the tablet’s own inability to distinguish applied user pressure gimps the iPad’s ability to challenge the venerable Wacom tablet.

To show us what could easily be, the guys at Ten One Design have put together this video in which they demonstrate an iPad capable of sensing the pressure applied to a Pogo Stylus.

It’s an impressive video, but there’s a rub: Ten One Design has to use a private API call to make the pressure function work, which means that it’s nothing we can expect to see on the iPad unless Apple rolls it into their UIKit framework.

Get on it, Apple. Through the dark times, it was artists and graphic designers who supported your brand; now it’s time to give them the drawing tablet they’ve always wanted.

Between cameras, gaming consoles, phones and laptops, proprietary cables and chargers are an irritating reality of the modern tech head’s life… and any solution that promises to consolidate them is going to find an audience with at least a few consumers with an OCD about clutter.

The iDapt charging station looks to be one of the more ambitious of charging stations, capable of juicing over 4,000 gadgets through a sleek base station capable of charging up to four devices at a time, in addition to a constabulary of interchangeable tips.

Naturally, it’ll charge anything that uses an iPod dock connector, as well as pretty much every other portable gadget under the sun. For $60, it looks like a good solution, although iDapt’s making its real bank by selling the adaptors, not the base station… and there’s just no getting around the fact that it’s way past time the world got a device charging, syncing and docking standard the way AV has HDMI.

Macs tend to be a bit underpowered when it comes to the GPU, but information gleaned from the firmware of the most recent Mac mini suggests that future iMacs and Mac Pros may be getting a beefy spec bump soon.

Specifically, the latest Mac mini OpenGL firmware reference support for the NVIDIA GeForce 480 and the Radeon HD 5000. Both cards are about to be superseded by newer offerings from both NVIDIA and ATI, but for Mac users, they would still represent a significant performance bump.

What’s curious here about the news is that Apple is again considering using ATI GPUs in their products. NVIDIA has been the sole supplier of discrete GPUs to Apple since late 2006, so if ATI is about to get back into the game, it would mark quite the transition.

Laurent Bourrelly, who likes to collect a few Apple-related things, had a great idea for a USB memory stick: how about make one out of some old Mac junk?

Here’s the result: the command key stick. If you want to make your own, Laurent has published some instructions – they’re in French, but you’ll be fine with just the pictures.

Then again, if you can read French, you might enjoy Laurent’s blog about all things Apple: pomme-c.

The upcoming release of Tron Legacy is going to be heralded by an glut of tie-in crap, but this Tron-branded iPod dock may be one of the better products of the bunch.

Designed to emulate the iconic, glowing identity disc / fatal frisbee of the Tron films, this dock is a collaboration between Disney and Monter, and it shows… at least in aesthetics. Features-wise, though, there doesn’t seem to be a lot separating this from your usual $100 dock, which makes the $249.99 asking price a bit hard to swallow. Fanboys only.

These guys were all unveiled at this year’s CES, but earphone-maker Etymotic doesn’t pop out products very often — their still-popular er6i earbuds have been around since 2004 — so when no less than four Etymotic goodies are hitting stores within the space of a month, we sit up and take notice.

It’s black, it’s hungry, and it gets along with almost anything. While that may sound like the monster-under-the-bed from childhood has found a good therapist, or maybe started smoking weed, it’s actually Seagate’s latest addition to their ultra-flexible GoFlex line of external drives, the 3TB FreeAgent GoFlex Desk.

Seagate’s done a little math in their pr release, and says the drive will store 49,980 hours of music — which is almost six years of tunes, playing 24/7. That’s a lot of partying.

The drive will ship mid-July, with a tag of $249.

Particularly in the Crayola colors, JayBird’s retro-styled Bluetooth headphones look quite attractive to me in a PlaySkool kind of way. They pair with your iPhone through a tiny little dongle and even feature side-mounted control buttons for cycling through your iPod’s music collection without digging it out of your purse, as well as an integrated mic perfect for making phone calls.

They’re a bit pricier than I want to spend on a pair of over-the-ear, foam-covered headphones at $99, but when all is said and done, I still like the style quite a bit.

This is something of a pro tip, but if you have an original 2007 iPhone dock, time to dust it off: DVICE has found that it actually works better than Apple’s new, custom-fit iPhone 4 dock.

The explanation is all about looseness: although the iPhone 4 dock perfectly fits the handset, it’s actually just a bit too tight, making the handset difficult to remove from the cradle with just one hand. The original iPhone dock has none of these problems.

Don’t have an original iPhone dock? Check the eBay listings to pick one up for a song?

In some recently leaked internal slides detailing Microsoft’s plans for the upcoming Windows 8 operating system, this nightmarish iMac-like monstrosity was revealed as a possibly forthcoming new multitouch all-in-one PC.

What the f… I mean… what is this thing? It looks like some horror that the utero-absorbed fetus of Johnny Ive’s Dark Half twin might design, or something that might creep out of Steve Job’s closet in the night, hungry for rape.

Jeez, Microsoft.

This new gadget is called a “Bringrr,” but we think that’s only because “Hey, Don’t Leave The Prototype in a Bar Next Time, Dumbass Device” wouldn’t fit on the box:

Pair the little Bluetooth-equipped plug with a phone, pop it into a car’s cigarette-lighter port, and it’ll have a conniption (alarm, flashing lights) if the car is started without the phone in close proximity.

Bringrr is $35.

My 27-inch iMac’s display is so big and gorgeous that ever since I got it, my 50-inch living room plasma has been getting a lot less burn-in. The 2560 x 1440 iMac display is just so choice: just about everything looks better on it.

Unfortunately, up until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to hook your iMac up to an HDMI source, which means there’s no good solution for watching a Blu-Ray movie or playing an Xbox 360 game on your iMac.

Belkin’s AV360 Converter is a simple bridge that acts as an HDMI-to-miniDisplayPort converter. It requires a free USB 2.0 port to keep powered, but otherwise you can pipe in any HDMI signal to your iMac or MacBook without any further fuss.

There’s a couple big downers here, though. The first is the price: $150 is a lot of money to spend on something like this. The second downer, though, is that while the AV360 Converter will accept a 1080p signal, it will downsample it to 720p on your Mac… pretty disappointing if you’re trying to finally watch your Blu-Ray copy of Planet Earth on the 27-inch iMac’s gorgeous display.

The AV360 Converter is available for order now directly from Belkin

TV-B-Gone is a small, portable device that allows you to remotely turn off televisions, and consequently it’s easily one of the most irritating, selfish and pretentious gadgets on Earth. Now it looks like an iPod.