The Price: $299

The Verdict: I could probably learn to like it more over time, but after using it for a couple of weeks, my general feeling is that I much prefer the Flip.

There are a few reasons: the biggest being the controls. While the Flip Mino HD has one big red button that stops and starts, plus some touch sensitive controls for volume and zoom, the buttons on the PICSIO aren’t quite touch sensitive, but aren’t quite mechanical either. Turning the device on sometimes takes a couple of attempts, and there’s precious little feedback from the buttons, which can be a bit frustrating here.

The second thing that’s kind of frustrating is storage – the PICSIO records to SDHC cards, which means you can never run out of storage, right? Well, a 2GB card means you get about 19 minutes of footage. That’s not a lot. To get a full hour, that means you’d need to get a 16GB card, which aren’t exactly cheap. All of a sudden, your $299 purchase has blown out to around $500 if you get a decent quality card.

The actual video quality though is pretty good. Unless you zoom in. Or shoot in low light. But they’re both issues common to these types of cameras. Still photos also suffer in terms of definition and focus – make no mistake, you’re better off with a dedicated pocket snapper for photos if you want quality shots. If you’re happy with taking photos on your phone though, these are on par, if not slightly better.

Image stabilisation is a welcome addition – it’s a digital stabilisation though, so it’s not fantastic, but it does work.

There are a few areas the PICSIO decimates the Flip – the screen is much bigger and therefore easier to see; there’s an HDMI and AV output rather than just USB, and there’s a macro switch on the side, although the benefit in performance using it is negligible.

Overall though, I think I prefer the Flip for its ease of use and inbuilt storage. The step up to “1080p” with the PICSIO just isn’t enough – the lens isn’t that much better to really benefit from the spec, and ultimately I find the inbuilt storage and ease of use more important for this class of device. But if you’ve got a crapload of SD cards lying around, the PICSIO could be a good option for you.

The Price: $130

The Verdict: Somewhat surprisingly, this has to be one of the best portable iPhone speaker systems I’ve ever tested. It’s far from perfect, and probably a little expensive, but it’s incredibly portable and sound quality is fantastic for such a compact device.

On the front part of the speaker is a slide-in bracket for your iPod or iPhone, which is a very custom fit, so you’ll need to take off any case or cover you use regularly. The bracket can be detached – and a 3.5mm headphone cable behind runs in a groove one way for using the Livespeakr with an iPhone and another way for using an iPod. There’s no dock, so you can’t charge your device at the same time as listening to your music, but then again there’s no mains power option for the speaker anyway.

On the back of the speaker is a really solid and compact kick stand, with different height settings depending on how your iPod is oriented. Because of the way it’s designed, you can’t mix up which setting to put it on – if you’ve got it on the wrong one, it will probably overbalance.

Rotating the dock between portrait and landscape is extremely satisfying as the speakers extend out past the width of the device. The build feels really solid, like you could do it over and over again and never have to worry about it breaking.

Sound quality is great for such a little device. It’s a bit light on the bass, which isn’t surprising given its size, but there’s very little distortion at maximum volume, which is a bit of a surprise. Battery life lasted me all week with moderate use, and it just charges over USB.

I would love to see a version with an AC adapter and a dock, as well as a slightly better way of storing the iPod’s bracket – it sticks out a fair way from the speaker, and it seems to me like a more elegant solution wouldn’t be too hard to come up with. But overall, I was really impressed by the Livespeakr. I’ll definitely have one in my bag next time I travel.

The Price: $1,699 RRP, although you can pick it up with a DVD receiver for $2498.

The Verdict: Originally, the reason I wanted to check out this surround speaker system from Jamo was the design. The stylish silver and black colour scheme was a perfect match for the 50-inch Panasonic plasma I picked up last year. Seriously, it’s like the Danish designers had a one night stand with Panasonic’s design team and this was their audio offspring, the two are so similar in style.

I had some immediate concerns after taking the speakers out of the box – the primary one being that the wiring connections aren’t exactly premium quality. A few years ago when I was editing T3 magazine, I spent my Christmas holidays wiring up my loungeroom for surround sound, and used some pretty high quality cable to do it. When the time came to connect these Jamo speakers however, the thick cable struggled to fit into the tiny connections on each of the speakers. Not only that, but the thick rubber shielding on the wires meant it was impossible to reattach the speakers’ bottom covers. That wasn’t too big a deal aesthetically, as you don’t tend to look underneath a speaker anyway. But the cover does act as a kind of rudimentary cable management system, and without that cover the wires tend to dangle a bit.

Audio quality is solid without being mind-blowingly great. You definitely get a huge benefit from the surround sound – playing Fable 2 was like immersing myself in the world of Albion with people talking to me from all directions. Watching Blu-ray movies is equally beneficial, but the sound seems to be slightly lacking in the higher end, especially in softer scenes. The subwoofer does a good job at delivering lower frequencies though, and when you crank up the volume the whole setup seems to improve dramatically.

For $1,699 RRP, you definitely get a decent sound and stylish design. But if you consider yourself a bit of an audiophile, the weak connections and lack of punch in the higher end will definitely hold you back. Although if you really are an audiophile, you probably won’t be looking at a $1700 speaker system at all, will you? For the rest of us, the combination of solid sound reproduction and a reasonable price is enough to warrant a recommendation.

With the iDisk app, you can view supported files like documents, PDFs, even stream music and movies (provided they’re in the right formats, natch) and remotely delete stuff from your iDisk. An annoying quirk, though, is that you have to dive into every folder individually to get it to refresh and show any new files. Document and PDF viewing work perfectly. With music and movies, the better the connection, the better the streaming experience, though don’t expect to stream your whole iTunes library over it—it’s a one song at a time kind of deal. And the movie file support is finicky, to say the least. But when it works, it’s pretty nice.

The strong point of the iPhone app as a manager is that it makes it incredibly easy to share files—go to the file you want to share, click the little wireless icon, and you can email a link to it with an expiration date you set. It also has a bookmark list of your friends’ public folders, you can quickly get back to them.

Bottom line, Air Sharing has nothing to worry about. Besides requiring a MobileMe account, you can’t upload files to your iDisk from the iPhone, or store any of them locally, which is what really gimps the app. I’d hope that Apple would expand its capabilities, but my suspicion is that they don’t actually want you to store files on your iPhone or browse through them like you would on a regular computer—it’s a conceptual line they don’t want to cross, so we’ve got a viewer with great interface here, nothing more.

The Price: $150

The Verdict: Think of this as a cheap Apple TV replacement. Since you can now rent and purchase movies directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch over a Wi-Fi connection, there’s no need to purchase a dedicated box like the Apple TV to do the exact same thing. Sure, the video quality isn’t anywhere near HD, but the convenience of getting to watch your videos on a big screen is pretty awesome.

Still – there’s plenty of room for improvement here. For a start, you need to manually unlock your iPhone before the included remote control will let you navigate through your iPod. Which kind of defeats the point of having a remote in the first place.

For some reason, the iPhone’s screen stays on during playback, which is kind of distracting, although you can turn it off – manually, once again.

The build quality is extremely solid, as you’d hope from a $150 dock. It’s small enough and lightweight enough to be transportable, which makes it a great asset for travellers. It connects to your TV via composite, which does nothing for video quality, but does mean it will connect to pretty much any TV.

The other concern is that for some reason, the dock doesn’t seem to work with the 3GS. Or more specifically, the remote doesn’t let you control the 3GS – it will still output the video when you manually control it from the iPhone. Not that Apple peripherals have ever been future-proofed with future Apple products, but it’s still a little disappointing.

The Gadget: Sony Ericsson W995a, an unlocked Wi-Fi and A2DP-enabled 3G mobile phone that puts together a 8.1-megapixel camera—with geo-tagging capabilities, face detection, flash, autofocus, and dedicated buttons—and a Walkman.

The Price: $US600

The Verdict:
The W995a is well built, feels solid. I mean, there’s nothing particularly wrong with it except for the keyboard, which seems flimsy and prone to inaccurate typing. It has a beautiful screen. The media reproduction capabilities are OK. You can use physical buttons to play, pause, go forward, and backwards. And they light up! Oh the joy.

And then there is the camera. I had great hopes for the 8.1mp camera. I wanted it to be great, but I just ended up with higher resolution versions of the same photos I get with my other phone…

OK. I’m sorry. I can’t do this.

The real story is that the W995a is basically the same mobile phone as the first mobile phone I’ve ever used and loved dearly: My trusty Sony Ericsson T68i. That thing and I had history, and I loved it. I loved the same matrix menu, the same convoluted user interface that makes you go through a hundred screens before reaching the place you want, and I even loved the predictive keyboard—which actually really didn’t work well, but whatever.

That was in 2002.

I don’t mean to pick on just Sony Ericsson here, which is probably one of the best dumbphones of its kind, a totally acceptable high end specimen. No, I’m talking about the entire damn category of super expensive phones that do nothing special compared to the phones we had a decade ago.

I went through other dumb mobile phones after that, all the same, from Nokia, from Motorola, LG, Samsung… all these dumb mobile phones have the same clunky interfaces, the same bad media handling, the same bad internet access. There were “smartphones” then too. But they weren’t that smart. I had a BlackBerry, for example, that was just a glorified mobile phone with a wheel and nicer mail than the rest, which didn’t have mail at all. Sony and Nokia also had “smartphones.” They were so happy.

Fast forward to 2007. With the mobile phone market already saturated with hundreds of combinations of dumbphones, Apple released the iPhone. Nokia dismissed it. Motorola too. (Motowho?) So did RIM and the rest. These “newbies” from Cupertino didn’t understand the mobile phone business—how could they introduce a phone? The market thought otherwise and the iPhone stole the show. People saw simplicity wrapped in good design, and even though not everybody bought it, everybody realised all of a sudden that mobile phones don’t have to be clunky machines full of buttons and neverending arbitrary menus.

The iPhone redefined the game and people instinctively knew that, and the smartest companies followed suit. Next came Android and Palm Pre and the not-yet-released Windows Mobile 7, versions of the same basic idea: Smartphones are not about piling on the crap. Smartphones really are simplerphones which, because of that, actually can do more than dumbphones.

The Real Verdict—About All Dumbphones: So my final question is: How can companies keep releasing the more or less the same dumbphones from 2002 in 2009? I don’t have a clue. There are 4 billion mobile phones in the planet and only 10% are smartphones. That figure is rising quickly and will only accelerate as Android takes off, Pre launches, RIM tries to for a smarter BlackBerry, and Apple keeps with its plan to dominate the world with the iPhone family of products. It’s no coincidence that Nokia—the largest set maker in the world—has gone from earning billions to trying to survive. It’s also no coincidence that Nokia’s head honcho names Apple, Microsoft and RIM as his chief competitors, and not LG, Samsung or least of all Motorola.

Some will say that there should be mobile phones for everyone. True. Cheap dumb mobile phones for $US10 a pop are great. But this thing costs $US600. Other similar phones from other companies cost about the same without a contract. In 2009, I can’t find any excuse to buy something like this.

Dumb mobile phones—like the W995a—are like the coolest, fastest typewriters in an age of word processors.

And they should all die.

The Price: $US390

The Verdict: Quite good. If you weren’t quite sure Windows Home Server was right for you, and you have a family with both Mac and PC machines, the LX195 is an easy way to experiment without paying the $US600ish dowry to hitch yourself to a full-blown EX machine.

The Catch: Like the EX HP Home Servers, you can retrieve individual files off the Time Machine backup, but you can’t use it to restore your machine at boot time. Which means if you don’t have a spare Mac in the house to grab the files off the server and load it onto a USB drive from which you can do a restore, you’ll have a more roundabout recovery process than you’d like.

The Point: The LX195 works just fine as a Home Server and a Time Machine target backup drive (its Gigabit Ethernet makes file transfers rather speedy), but lacks the extras the company just introduced to the EX485 and EX487 that allow users to stream and convert video to iPhones and PSPs. If all you want is the base functionality, this is definitely a fine choice. But at the same time, you have to look at Acer’s $US400 solution that does have four expandable drive bays. But Acer’s might not have the iTunes server and media capabilities that HP does. [HP]

Relatively cheap, but maintains most of HP’s Home Server functionality

Doesn’t have the newer EX updates

No internal-expandable storage, only USB

The Price: About $US2 per three puff inhaler.

The Verdict: The size of a container of Chapstick, you pull the telescoping Le Whif out to coat your entire tongue and mouth with a tiny amount of chocolate. The “essence” of chocolate, as it was described to me.

Words cannot capture the humiliation of inhaling a chocolate/raspberry Le Whif, then coughing the sugar out of my lungs, like a first time cigar smoker but even more pansy. (Supposedly the 80 to 300 micron chocolate pieces are too big to enter the lungs, so it’s possible that I just sucked down a nasty coat of chocolate into my trachea.)

My second and third puffs, however, were more successful. The sensation is akin to sucking a tiny bit of cocoa powder through a straw. And while not necessarily enjoyable in any way, it was admittedly a lot of chocolate flavour for only .8 calories a stick.

A spokesman explained to me that just as Man had evolved from eating one meal a day, He’s gone on to eat 2, 3 and then even a recommended 5. And under this logic, Man would eventually breathe food at all times. So Le Whif is working with a variety of French chefs to capture the essence of their dishes. If and when Le Whif releases inhalable foie gras, I might try again. Until then, I’ll stick to good old fashioned overeating. [Le Whif]

The Price: Each module costs $US100, and you need at least two to make things happen, so you’re looking at $US200 or even $US300 to start. (Haven’t seen any combo pricing deals yet.)

The Verdict: It’s a unique set of wireless toys that is a lot of fun to play with, and would have been a must-have back when I used to play guitar in a band. But these things can be cool even in the home of a total non-musician, which is why I’m bringing them up at all.

Think of it as Sonos Portable. You set one of them to transmit, and start playing a song from your computer, iPod, any audio source at all really, including, mind you, a CD or DVD player with S/PDIF output. Set another one to receive, then attach that to earphones, a boom box or your home theatre system, and you hear everything with no latency. Well, with about 10 milliseconds of almost totally unnoticeable latency. In “broadcast” mode, you an add additional Pipelines—E-Mu says “any number of receivers”—so that many rooms, or many people, can catch your tuneage at the same time.

Of course, if you do play music, you can plug your guitar into one, set it for “pairing” mode, stick another one at your amp set to receive. In this scenario the latency is just 6.6ms, and you are suddenly completely unfettered.

I tested it in my house using prerecorded audio, and it sounded great. I stuck my computer with the source music down in the basement, and clipped a receiver to my belt with headphones plugged in, and wandered throughout the house. The signal faltered only when I was at the absolute farthest point away from the source, which probably was right around the advertised 15 meters (49 feet) of range that these babies can get.

Battery life is good, perhaps the big reason this thing even brushes the $US100 point: You get 10 hours in receive mode, and 5 while transmitting.

The only issue I ran into, if you could call it that, was the “DIP switch” setup, which you can see in the rear shot above. I am not afraid of a few switches, but it seemed a complex way to set the channel, the receive or transmit mode, and the audio preferences. Not sure what would have been better, and once you set them, you can almost forget them, but it was, initially, a bit of a pain.

These babies aren’t cheap, but setting up a way to wirelessly listen to music at home (like, say, piping music outdoors, syncing music between multiple rooms, or even walking around with earphones, listening to music playing somewhere else) seems worthwhile for $US200, and the one-to-many broadcast mode makes it quite a unique product. My only gripe is that it would be cool if E-MU made an even better priced unit without the battery, so you could pick and choose.

Regardless of that, if you jam in a band, you definitely need a pair of these buggers—though the rest of your band might suddenly hate you for getting all Angus Young on them. Of course, Angus did all that crazy guitar shit with cord attached, but that’s plain super human. [Pipeline Product Page]

If you’ve got a crappy ISP, obviously, a special thingamajig on your end won’t help you—it can’t fix the whole internet, and it doesn’t claim to. What it claims is that network traffic running through it bypasses the Windows network stack, so it’s a more direct connection to your game, and less load on your CPU, resulting in less lag and theoretically a higher framerate. Different from the older Killer cards, this also has a built-in voice processor to offload chat. You can customise network and bandwidth priority, app by app—giving your games the highest priority, obvs—so theoretically you can leave your torrents running and game normally.

Did it work? No and yes. I really didn’t notice any difference in my framerates or latency playing Team Fortress 2. I keep the game’s netgraph feature running by default, and I always play on the same server, so I have a pretty solid grip on what’s typical of my machine in terms of framerate and latency. Playing 10 minutes on my standard connection and then switching immediately to the Killer Xeno for 10 minutes, and repeating this sequence three times, it was about the same every time—if it improved my connection or framerate, I couldn’t taste it.

It does do a pretty decent job as a local QoS (quality of service) client. I ran a bunch of torrents and my game played perfectly okay, just like if I wasn’t downloading a whole bunch of crap. However, if you’ve got a decent router, you could do the same thing if you know what you’re doing. And really, router-level QoS is the only way to deal with your roommate’s crazy torrent habits—the Killer Xeno Pro can’t do anything about what the other people on your network are doing, so even then, its application is fairly limited.

Is it worth $US130? If your computer’s crappy enough, getting back that slight amount of overhead used by the Windows network stack and your usual chat client could make a difference. And if you can’t figure out QoS, its software is pretty easy to use. But if your computer’s that crappy, why are you spending $US130 on a network card? [Killer Xeno Pro]