Jabra Cruiser2 Bluetooth Speakerphone Review

jabra-cruiser2-sunvisor

It’s been almost exactly two years since I picked up the solar-powered LG Bluetooth hand-free gadget. For the first few months, I used it extensively in the car – very rarely needing to plug it in for supplemental juice. But the speakerphone eventually ended up collecting dust on the desk for quite some time, as I reverted back to my most favored Jawbone Prime, which has the right mix of style, comfort, and performance. As my car talk time began to increase several months ago, I pulled the LG out of cold storage. In 2011, its audio performance on either end is probably never stellar. More annoying is the tiny power button that needs to be held down a second or two and no standby mode. And, thus, my search for a replacement began.

Unfortunately, solar power speakerphones really haven’t taken off the way one would have hoped — there just aren’t too many options. So I settled on the more traditionally charged Bluetooth units, with two in particular standing out: The BlueAnt S4 and Jabra Cruiser2. They both run about $70 these days, and I was leaning towards the BlueAnt given its potentially useful voice control and styling. Yet, I came across the Jabra on a Costco run this week… and an impulse purchase ended the debate.

Read more

Source Code: Because Groundhog Day Lacked Dubious Science

Caution… potential movie spoilers ahead.

Many characters in film and television have wrestled with the question, “Does she really love me for me?” But only a select few, including Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) and that guy from Quantum Leap, have had to answer it in another dude’s body.

Source Code, Duncan Jones‘ sophomore directorial effort, after debuting with the vastly superior Moon in 2009, is the kind of movie where you can sort of accept the things that are happening on screen until people start trying to explain them. Our hero, Captain Stevens, wakes up on a train and spends the rest of the movie exploding for a good cause.

Stevens is part of an experiment that transports him back to the last eight minutes of one passenger’s life on a Chicago commuter train to figure out who placed the bomb that wiped out everyone on board. Nothing Stevens does can affect the outcome in his own timeline, so he’s strictly gathering information to thwart a possible future attack. Every time his host body dies, Stevens is forced back on the train to try again. Think Groundhog Day meets Seven Days.

Read more

Vulkano Flow, The First Placeshifter Under $100

Vulkano Flow

Vulkano Flow, the first of two new Monsoon Multimedia placeshifters announced at CES, is now available for purchase from the likes of Amazon and Fry’s Electronics for a mere $99. Making it the least expensive Slingbox-esque product on the market.

Unlike Moonsoon’s 2010 Vulkano product that tried to do it all, with less than stellar results, the Vulkano Flow attempts to do one thing well — stream television content around and beyond your home. I’ve been evaluating the Flow for several weeks and it largely succeeds. In fact, you’ve already seen it in action (here and here).

As with all personal, hardware-based placeshifting solutions the Vulkano Flow hangs off your set-top box or between a STB and television. In my case, the Flow has primarily been used to beam FiOS TV DVR video to Mac, PC, iPhone, and Android software clients. While Sling still stubbornly refuses to integrate wireless capabilities, the Vulkano Flow can optionally connect to your home network via 802.11n – which is the config I’ve been using. And the streaming experience over WiFi, both within and beyond the home, has been very good. 3G, not so much.

Vulkano Flow

The hardware is contained within the same or a very similar enclosure as the original Vulkano (“Platinum”) which will presumably also be reused for the upcoming Blast… given the taped over SD slot and functionless IR receiver. But for 99 bucks, I can’t complain. In terms of size, the Vulkano is wider than all Slingboxes, but with a much lower profile – it sits well in the cabinet on a DVR. Streaming resolution is equivalent to the Slingbox Solo, maxing out at 720×480. So while the Flow can take in your HD content, the encoded retransmission is limited to standard def. However when on the road, especially via mobiles, this shouldn’t be a practical problem.

Read more

Hands On: Sony HD Radio in the Car

Until recently, the stereo in my car was so old it still had a tape deck in it, but I’ve finally upgraded the audio system with a new HD radio, the Sony CDX-GT700HD Xplod. And after about a week, my initial evaluation is a big thumbs up. I love the new spectrum of stations available. It’s not Internet radio, but it is a whole lot more content than I was getting before. For example, as an NPR fanatic, I’ve long rued the Saturday morning drives with only cooking and gardening shows available on my public radio station. Now I can switch to HD2 and catch up on Studio 360 for pop culture and arts news.

For actual Internet content, I can also connect my phone or Slacker music player through the Sony radio’s line-in jack, or USB port. This is the biggest reason I jumped on an upgrade. I’m tired of having the car be the only place I can’t access the music and podcasts I want. And since I won’t be getting a new, tricked-out vehicle any time soon, an after-market solution was definitely the way to go.

Other benefits of the new system include scrolling metadata, a huge number of channel pre-sets, and the ability to tag songs for later look-up on iTunes. (Tagging only works if you have an iPod.) I also love the hidden CD dock, which opens like a secret compartment, but is still dead simple to access. I’m not a sound geek, but Amazon reviewers also praise the radio’s sound quality and flexible EQ system.

Read more

Peel, iPhone TV Remote & Content Discovery

Over the last year or so, we’ve come a long way from those initial, unsightly and simplistic iPhone IR remote control dongles. And Peel ($100) represents the next generation of virtual remote. In fact, it’s potentially a contender to replace your Harmony.

The Peel solution consists of an attractive iPhone app, a small orb-like thingy (“fruit”) that you’d place on a coffee- or end-table, and a wireless transmitter (“cable”) that connects directly one’s router. The Peel fruit and cable communicate via the ZigBee spec, as opposed to garden-variety 80211 WiFi, so the fruit may get up to 6 months of power from the included C battery. But the networking is transparent as setup is a breeze – connectivity is automatically configured with next to no intervention. Sync and go.

Configuring Peel to control the devices in your AV cabinet is also fairly efficient. It may not offer the same level of complex interactions as found with Harmony, but it also doesn’t require endless tweaking from a computer. Peel’s iPhone app quickly walks you through the process of registering your components. I had a loaner unit controlling my Panasonic plasma and FiOS DVR in just a minute or so from the couch. A minute later, I had my Roku added to the mix with the television inputs correctly mated to their respective set-tops.

Read more

Hands on the McTiVia PC-to-TV Streamer

We continue to find ourselves in a transition period where the majority of our set-top boxes and televisions aren’t sufficiently empowered to deliver Internet content. While some of us have resorted to directly connecting a computer to the HDTV, a variety of solutions have sprung up to relay PC-based content onto the television. Intel’s Wireless Display (WiDi) and Veebeam are examples we’ve covered in recent months. However, as each of these manufacturers uniquely tackle this challenge, McTiVia is a new entrant worth discussing.

Basically, McTiVia ($199) allows you to broadcast your Mac or PC display and audio straight to your television. Unlike Veebeam, which includes a wireless USB dongle you attach to your computer that communicates to a small box co-located at a television, McTiVia is software powered. And 8 computers can be configured to beam their desktops to the TV (in a much more agnostic method than Intel’s CPU-locked down offering).

One of my primary complaints with these sorts of products has been the inability to remote control your computer content on the television. Both Intel and Veebeam expect you to sit on your couch with a laptop… on your laptop. So one of the things that makes McTiVia compelling is its USB port to facilitate the use of a wireless keyboard and mouse. Although, it’s not clear what sort of latency one can expect when using it.

Read more

VuPoint and the Art of Digitizing Old VHS Tapes

I’ve been playing with the VuPoint ST100B Digital Video Converter for several days now, and so far I’m pleased with my impulse purchase. Digitizing old analog media is more an art than a science, but one that at least has gotten easier over the years.

Set-up with the VuPoint converter is quick and painless. It comes packaged with cords to plug into your TV and VHS player, and once you insert an SD card, hit power, and switch over to the right TV input, you’re good to go for recording. Your choices at this point are limited, but in this case, that’s a good thing. There are only four buttons on the VuPoint box – Power, Record, Play, and Next. Hit Record once to start recording, and again to stop. To enter playback mode, hit the Play button once, and then press it again to view your latest recording. If you have multiple videos recorded, use  the Next button to cycle through your library.

And that’s it.

Read more

Hands On with the Amazon Kindle 3 e-Reader

This morning I took (early) delivery of Amazon’s new Kindle 3 – I opted for the WiFi only version – a device that claims 50% better contrast than any other e-reader, a 21% smaller body while keeping the same 6″ size reading area, and a 20% increase in the speed of page turns. These are, of … Read more