The Price

$US180 (technically $US200, but Amazon sells ‘em cheaper)

The History

Read our X4 review if you’ve never heard of these products before. This article will make a lot more sense once you’ve read that.

The Improvements

• 2.4GHz RF instead of IR audio transmission
• USB powered instead of wall jack
• Dolby 7.1 Surround Sound instead of Dolby 5.1

I was sceptical that the Ear Force X41 would be any better than the Ear Force X4. But after using the headset for a week, I’m remiss to return to the X4s I bought last year.

Quite simply, the audio is more consistently clear with the new RF transmission, now that line-of-site and ambient light has become a non-factor. And I think that overall audio quality, while the speaker components themselves remain unchanged, has seen a bump because of this cleaner signal. (For those concerned, I was able to use the headset without interfering with my Xbox’s Wi-Fi adaptor or my home network — the primary potential hiccup with using RF instead of IR. Results may vary, I’m sure.)

As for the jump from Dolby 5.1 to 7.1 support, you probably won’t ever notice. Playing Modern Warfare 2, missiles fly by your head with impressive panning, but the sound localisation is no better than it was in the X4s…though to be fair, that’s not necessarily a knock, even if the audio lacks the shining moments you’ll enjoy in the best surround sound headphones offered by companies like Sony.

Oh, and the headset still requires AAAs as opposed to bundling a rechargeable lithium ion. I will say, however, that the batteries I tested with have broken the 10-hour barrier by a decent margin, and they’re still operational.

As a wireless, surround sound headset for the Xbox 360, the X41 is at the top of its class (at least partially because it’s still the only product in its class). If you’re willing to go wired, you can save about $US100+ on a cheaper version of the Ear Force, or you can take a look at the even more expensive but lauded Astro A40s.

In fact, if you guys are interested, let me know in the comments. I may try to call in a pair of those Astros in to hear for myself.

Comfortable

Superb chat quality

RF offers smooth audio transmission

Highly specialised but useful product

Overall audio quality is OK, not stellar

AAA batteries? C’mon!

The AVIC-F10BT isn’t just an in-dash satnav – it’s a complete in-car entertainment system. On top of its 7-inch touchscreen display, the AVIC comes with dedicated cables installed into your glovebox for connecting an iPod or USB device, a DVD player and SD card behind the screen and built-in stereo Bluetooth. There are so many different elements to this product that the only real way to review it is to break it down into sections.

Entertainment
In the glovebox of the car is an iPod cable. It’s quite long, so you could run it all the way to the back, although you probably wouldn’t. Once you plug in your iPod or iPhone, it starts charging and all control goes through to the AVIC system. And it’s a very familiar interface – you get most of the same menus as your iPod, album art and a big “clickwheel” (although it’s really just a big four-way button on the touchscreen that looks like a clickwheel. It’s not a complete translation of your iPod though – there’s no support for Genius or Genius mixes, which is a bit of a shame.

But that’s made up for by the fact that the AVIC supports video. Sure, for safety reasons it’s restricted to when you have the handbrake on, but just the fact that you can play back video from your iPhone on your display is fantastic. If you have rear screens in your car, you can use the AVIC to send video from your iPhone to the rear seats while you use the satnav.

Of course, there’s also the built-in DVD player which will do the same thing, as well as play back CDs (both audio and MP3). The SD card also plays back music, and although I didn’t get to test it, the specs say it’ll play back DivX and H.264 files via either the SD or DVD slots.

There’s also the ability to play stereo Bluetooth through the system, and if your car has steering wheel audio controls, you can get them wired up to control the AVIC, although the car I was driving didn’t have them.

Being a Pioneer car, the audio playback was pretty awesome, but most of that was the speakers. In terms of controls, the touchscreen managed most of it, although there are dedicated volume and track forwards and back buttons on the bottom of the screen.

Bluetooth
The Bluetooth functionality is a godsend. My last car had a Motorola Bluetooth hands-free kit installed that used the car’s speakers, and despite being valued at a few hundred dollars, it had nothing on the AVIC’s Bluetooth. For a start, the AVIC has a screen, which lets you see details a more traditional Bluetooth system could only dream of. Once you’ve paired up your phone, you can see your signal strength and your network on the screen. But the killer is the ability to copy your contact list from the phone over to the AVIC’s 2GB of internal storage, which means you can easily call anyone on your contact list with a few presses of the touchscreen. You also get missed calls, recent calls and a shortcut to your home number easily located on the phone’s main screen.

Considering the legal implications of using your phone while driving these days, this is almost worth the price of admission in itself. OK, not quite, but it’s still the best implementation of installed Bluetooth I’ve played with.

Satnav
There’s a lot to be said for navigation on a seven-inch screen. It’s easy to view, easy to control and, well, that’s pretty much it. Considering I’ve long been lamenting the fact that satnavs tend to be fairly stagnant in terms of new features that are actually useful, having a device with such a big screen was quite refreshing. It uses the latest WhereIs maps, which shows off things like golf courses on the screen as you drive past them. It’s also big enough that it can display your music track information (and album artwork) on the screen at the bottom, even with the satnav running.

There are a couple of other noteworthy aspects to the satnav – first off, it’s a learning device, so if you like to take a particular shortcut, it’ll start directing you that way when you next take that route.

The other big thing is a result of the device been installed – the device will actually track your position when you drive through tunnels. No beeps and messages about lost satellite reception. No confusion about underground exits. In other words, proper navigation wherever you are. And that’s awesome. It really is.

The AVIC-F10BT comes with SUNA traffic, although I have no idea where the TMC antenna is. It’s certainly not running along the bottom of your front windshield, and doesn’t need to be plugged in each time you want to use the satnav.

The Menu
The touchscreen interface is simple. The Home screen gives you the option of Music, Satnav or Phone. But if you press the home button again on the home screen, there’s a customisable page of shortcuts to key functions of the device. Things like navigate home or launching the FM radio. That means you’re no more than three presses from all the key functions of the device, and it doesn’t get much better than that.

There’s a dedicated button on the bottom of the unit that switches between satnav and music control. That may sound like an obvious inclusion, but it’s only when you’re using it that you realise how much sense it actually makes.

Verdict
This device costs $2999, plus installation. It’s the top of the range Pioneer AVIC system though, and offers the ability to control rear screens and audio output if you have a truly kickass speaker setup in your car. It also works with a reverse camera, which can be installed as an optional extra.

But despite all that, $3K still seems pretty steep. But there are a couple of things to consider – if you’re buying a new car, you’re likely to pay that much to get a satnav option, but you’ll probably miss out on the whole Bluetooth and iPod functionality. The other thing is that Pioneer have a cheaper option, which has a smaller screen and fewer functions, but maintains the core aspects of the device (iPod, Bluetooth and satnav) selling for under a grand (plus installation). Considering top of the line satnavs cost almost a grand, that’s incredibly good value. You do need a double DIN free in your car, but if you can spare it and the cash to get it installed, I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending this system. It’s a complete solution for most of your in-car needs, and well worth the price of admission.

[Pioneer]

The Basic Differences in Chips

First off, I should note that the Core i7 chip has what Intel calls a “turbo mode”. That is, when it’s not utilising all of its cores, it can dynamically overclock itself up to 3.4GHz on whatever single cores are in use. It can, as shown in this video, work in steps. So you get turbo benefits from partial use of the four cores in this iMac’s chip, but also, you get turbo benefits when each core is only being partially used. For example, if four cores are running but only at a fraction of their total capacity (less then 100 per cent), the cores can still run a little faster. This should theoretically make up for the difference between the two-core 3.06GHz chip and the hyper-threaded quad core chip at a base of 2.8GHz.

The other thing to realise about these newer Core i7 chips are that they have no northbridge — or bus — between the memory and CPU. The memory controller is built right into the processor, and there’s a new tech called Quickpoint interconnect which connects the cores in a point-to-point architecture. Core i7 supports triple channel memory (which would use three banks at once), but this iMac only came loaded with two banks of RAM filled. Like our other iMac, that’s a 2GB + 2GB arrangement.

Matt explains more about i7 here. (And yes, there are differences between i7 and i5, besides clock speed.)

*Note that this machine also had a faster ATI Radeon 4850 video card with 512MB of RAM (versus the 4670 card in the other iMac) which may have impacted performance in several apps. I have no idea which of these apps uses the GPU to accelerate its tasks under Snow Leopard. (For example, Preview may use it to help render JPGs faster, or it may not. Apple could not tell me. In Adobe After Effects, the Radeon series of cards apparently is not supported for OpenCL acceleration. )

Performance with Multithreaded Apps

In short, any task we tried that expressly was written to either a) take advantage of multiple cores, or b) take advantage of multiple cores through Snow Leopard’s multicore middleware, Grand Central Dispatch, were 2-3 times faster. (More on that here.) These results include:

• 64-bit versions of Geekbench, which focus on CPU and memory tests.
• Adobe After Effects benchmarks
• Opening 20 images of Tokyo Tower that are 2000×2000 pixels and 35MB each.

Impressive stuff, but honestly, those tests were kind of uninteresting to me. I mean, those tests don’t really have any correlation to my daily computing use. So on a whim, after benchmarking, I tested handbrake, the DVD ripping software I love. It, too, was freaking fast.

I know the app is multi-threaded, but I did not know what level of optimisation it was written for. I was blown away by a 3x speed multiplier with the i7. On the Core i7 iMac, it took 43 minutes to rip a DVD, Storm Riders, a surfing film from the ’70s featuring Gerry Lopez (my favourite) and others. On the Core2Duo machine, it took 147 minutes! I know this is basically a DVD read test coupled with decoding and video conversion, but the results have me excited because this is a real task that takes my computer a long time to do, performed by a program that hasn’t been revised in a year.

Performance With Single-Core Optimised Apps (Otherwise Known as Reality)

Unfortunately, there are still very few applications that take advantage of multiple cores directly or via Snow Leopard’s GCD, not even video-based, let alone general-purpose computing.

Photoshop CS4 on the Mac, which is not set up to handle multicore processors, showed almost less than a 3 per cent improvement using the Driver Heaven benchmark. Basic tasks, like booting and shutdown, saw virtually none. Playing the 1080p Quicktime trailer of Avatar consistently showed that the i7 was using 3 per cent less of its total CPU than the Core2Duo, but I wonder if that’s a result of the faster graphics card kicking in using CoreCL. Xbench, the old program that does a more comprehensive job of benchmarking a system from disks to processors, showed almost no difference.

I think Xbench, which hasn’t been updated in years, is a solid benchmark for that old program that you depend on but has been long abandoned or at least ignored by its developer.

These scores, again, are in relation to the top line 3.06GHz Core2Duo iMac we tested. Some benchmarks have come in from the web comparing the i7 to the i5. Here’s one that claims a 30 per cent jump using Geekbench. Now we know Geekbench likes and does well with more cores and is a synthetic CPU test. But if the i5 is 30 per cent slower, and the i7 pulls even with the 3.06 GHz Core2Duo chip in single threaded activity — most day-to-day activity — does that mean the i5 is slower than the cheaper Core2Duo? Maybe. Probably not 30 per cent, since Geekbench is strictly CPU/memory and likes more cores, and this stuff does not translate so literally in the real world. But we can assume the i5 will have 30 per cent less jump from the top tier Core2Duos, translating into a mere 1.3-2 times speed increase from last gen chips on programs that like cores.

Value

For the most part, in our review, I said that you should stick to the preconfigured options, upgrading to Apple’s next recommended config before considering upgrades to the lower tier models. How does that advice change now that we’ve seen the i7? I don’t know! I guess it depends if you’re a betting man. If you think programs for Snow Leopard using GCD are coming, paying $US200-$US500 bucks more from the top line Core2Duo chip for an i5 or i7 might make sense. The probability of you getting programs that can use those extra cores goes up if you are a graphics or video professional who expects to see support from Adobe, Apple, etc. (Apple already claims big jumps in Aperture that we weren’t able to test.) Or if you rip a lot of DVDs! The rest of you? The Core2Duo stuff could be fine for today and fine for tomorrow. But the Core i7 is not worse for today and will definitely be faster tomorrow. It just costs more.

Me personally? I’d opt for the Core i7. I just might wait ’til the new iMacs refresh a bump and the i7 is cheaper and part of a standard build. But I’m patient like that.

[iMac Review]

TouchWiz is the first custom Android interface that’s worse than the standard one, and shows what kind of horrible things emerge when Samsung’s interface designers are left unchecked. Here’s how I think the design process went, roughly: The designers dropped a bunch of acid, stared at old Atari games while binging on Taco Bell, then proceeded to shit all over the phone for hours and hours.

If it’s not inherently ugly, like text input screens with awful ’80s neon orange and blue, it’s gratuitous and redundant, like the 3D app cube. Or an entirely separate menu of Samsung icons for apps. And some things, like moving the slide-out menu to the left instead of its traditional place on the bottom, actually work against the way you use the phone — the menu gets in the way now, since I’d often bring it out by accident while changing between desktops. It’s just… terrible. Worse, Home Switcher, an app that reverts phones back to the stock Android home screen, can’t erase Samsung’s disgusting mojo. The Behold II would be 10x better with a vanilla build of Android 1.6.

Even the phone hardware is a mess. The front of the phone is an orgy of buttons: seven, to be precise, not including a d-pad, with a dedicated button for the app cube. The lock key isn’t just on the side but it’s kind of hidden, flush against the bezel. The USB port is weirdly shoved on top. And, uh, what the hell is up with the back plate?

Two things are good about the Behold II — Samsung’s custom camera setup comes straight out of their point-and-shoot cameras, and is packed with features, like extensive manual controls and burst shooting, and it’s very fast unlike the rest of the phone. The other is the AMOLED display which is nice, though marred by the same kind of bluish tint as Samsung’s other AMOLED Android phone, the Moment.

Take a good long look at the Behold II though: It’s a warning to other developers what not to do, and a scary look at one dark possible future for Android, in its infinite permutations. Not just deep fragmentation of the platform, but customised crimes against humanity, perpetrated in the name of Android. It makes me want to cry, except that my brain’s too mushy to make my eyes work.

The $US100 Pixi made sense once upon a time, when the Pre was $US200 and Palm needed a phone for the masses — like the Centro, oncer upon a time — to establish the webOS as a real platform. A leaner, cheaper version of the Pre was a good idea. Now, you can get the real thing — faster, stronger, screenier — for under a hundred US bucks. The Pixi’s existential crisis is not insignificant.

What’s Neutered vs. the Pre

• Slower processor (using an older ARM11 architecture vs. faster ARM Cortex A8)
• Smaller and squintier 400×320, 2.63-inch, 18-bit colour screen (vs. 480×320, 3.1-inch, 24-bit colour)
• 2-megapixel camera (vs. 3-megapixel)
• No Wi-Fi

Pixi Perfect Design (Just About)

There has not been a candybar phone more perfectly designed and executed than the Pixi. It’s exactly the size and shape a phone that aspires to be small should be. It’s a Hot Pocket sliced in half, but flat and glossy on top and round and rubbery on the bottom. It almost feels fake, like a concept that you hope is a real phone but isn’t, except that in this case, it really is. It fits inside of an iPhone, if you wanna get more literal.

Plastic, slightly sticky Rice Krispie keys, arranged in four rows form a keyboard so electrifyingly good it’s thrilling, like finding an actually sweet wind-up toy in your cereal box (Rice
Bubbles, of course) every time you type. The keys are tiny, but have a deceptive amount of rise, so your fat thumbs can feel out individual nubs, which pop in this remarkably satisfying way when you click down. The size-to-goodness ratio might just be the best on any keyboard I’ve used. If there’s any reason to pick the Pixi over the Pre, it’s if you type a shocking amount on your phone, because the Pixi’s is better by like an order of magnitude. Or eleventy.

Between the screen, with its shaved corners, and the keyboard is a stretch of empty space. Until you run your finger along it, and a spark — a line of light, really — emerges. The LED strip, invisible when it’s not indicating something, replaces the ball on the Pre, which I always thought was a weird little speed bump when you stroked the gesture area, anyway. It’s kind of beautiful, the stark aesthetic of it emotionally tinged with sci-fi imagery, from Gort to Cyclop’s visor.

Two things are wrong. The screen lock button on the top left is a little too in touch with the overall robustness of the phone, so it’s hard to push and doesn’t provide enough feedback. On the opposite end of that spectrum, the trap door covering the micro USB port feels flimsy and aggravatingly snaps shut, making plugging in a USB cable a struggle worthy of a Homerian epic every single time.

Tinkerbell Would Be Pissed

The Pixi is slow.

Achingly.

Maddeningly.

Ripyourhairoutandsmashitagainstthewallingly.

It lags, it hangs, it stutters, it freezes. A lot. A simple fact: Multitasking isn’t better than unitasking when it takes longer to get shit done. An example: I wanted to take a picture while I had the browser and and App Catalog open. Simple. The camera froze spectacularly, rendering the entire phone completely unusable for well over 30 seconds — whenever I tried to flick the camera card away (cards are apps), it would shoot halfway off the screen, then appear back in its place. Somewhere between 30-45 seconds later, it regained composure. That’s with just three core apps open, and no active syncing happening in the background.

True, I could sometimes have up to four apps running without problems, at least for a minute or so, before things starting getting cludgy. But it hangs even with just a single app running sometimes. (Just try opening a website.) And every time you open an app, there’s a solid expanse of time that elapses that you can feel, and it gets old real quick. Maybe webOS is just more transparent about load times than the iPhone, which masks them with title screens, but the whole experience of using this phone is like swimming through very pretty jelly, with one arm, wearing a cast-iron suit, or something like that.

Screen, Camera and Other Hardware

You get used to the smaller screen and it’s 80 fewer pixels, mostly. It’s cramped, but you’ll only be directly, painfully cognisant of it from time to time, like when you’re reading some text outside of Palm’s own apps or navigating web pages. It’s not a crappy screen, but it’s not exceptionally bright or vibrant, either. The touch accuracy seemed less spot-on than the Pre too, though that could’ve been the effect of smaller targets because of the tinier screen, like the drop-down menu for apps in the top left corner, which is just a sliver on the Pixi.

The Pixi’s 2-megapixel camera is unimpressive. The comparison shot above was taken with a 2-megapixel iPhone 3G in the exact same lighting and place, snapped within 10 seconds of each other. The camera app, when it’s not freezing up, is quick to shoot once you press the button though, which is definitely something.

And I’ll just say it: No Wi-Fi sucks, since there are lots of place in NY where even Sprint’s 3G can’t penetrate.

Software

The Pixi comes with webOS 1.3.1. Palm’s definitely tuned things up since webOS originally shipped in June with stuff like more support for Yahoo services, the ability to buy songs over 3G, performance improvements and other interface sprucing up, but it’s not a radically difference experience than the one Chen documented exhaustively here. (In other words, read that for the software review, since it’s basically the same, just much slooooower on the Pixi.)

What’s different now is that there are over 300 apps in the App Catalog, and Palm’s dumping fresh ones in every week. So the app situation is greatly improved. The problem is that it’s still behind the rest of the pack — iPhone, Android and BlackBerry — and being fourth-place development priority for cross-platform developers with limited resources it not a great place to be, so Palm’s got a rough road here. Oh, one interesting point, since this is supposed to be the smartphone OS for multitasking, is that while an app is downloading from the App Catalog, you can’t browse for other apps — if you leave the download page, it cancels. So I hope you’ve got good Sprint reception in your house.

The other thing that’s changed is iTunes. Palm’s former official way to sync your media to your phone is broken. Irrevocably. Even if Palm does restore iTunes syncing with its dirty hack (no really, it is a dirty hack, impersonating an iPod with a false USB ID) the entire model is screwed. Putting people buying your phone in the middle of a stupid pissing match that you’re destined to lose isn’t cool. In the meantime, Palm’s official solution is for people to sideload or use third-party apps like doubleTwist.

Don’t Buy It

The Pixi is screwed. It’s totally cannibalised by the technologically superior Pre, which you can find for under $US100. Even if you can get the Pixi for $US30, it’s worth trading up to the Pre for $US40 or $US50 more if you’re absolutely wedded to the idea of a webOS phone, simply for the speed and screen. Mostly the speed, since the Pixi is brain damaged, three-legged dog slow, as nice as the hardware is on the outside.

Not to mention, for a hundred dollars, there are phones that just offer better experiences and aren’t in the same awkward position Palm is in the smartphone fight. I’m talking of course, about the Droid Eris, Android’s $US99 darling on Verizon. The entire reason to buy the Pixi — a value proposition — has completely evaporated. And I almost feel bad about that. Almost.

Incredible keyboard (for the size)

Awesome design and build

webOS is nice

Camera sucks

Palm’s dumb iTunes fight

Slow

I mean, slooooooooooooooooooooow

The Price

$US100 for a limited time, $US120 afterwards. Includes international power adaptors and AC charger, but battery is sold separately. Starts shipping November 25 to the US and some countries in Europe.

The Verdict

It’s the same questionably essential yet unquestionably adorable Chumby, with a new case and a lower (and very tempting) price. I have no idea what its makers meant the original beanbag Classic (newly renamed) to be used for, but the One is more than a little reminiscent of old-school clock radios. And if you look at it as simply a badass clock radio, rather than an amorphous connected widget device, you really appreciate it. Imagine waking up to Pandora, then rolling over and checking your email and Twitter before hitting snooze for another 10 minutes of sleep. Awesome, right? But what exactly has changed from the Chumby Classic?

Instead of the touchscreen-in-a-beanbag look, it’s now rocking a smooth white plastic casing with a big honking volume knob on the side and a 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen. I really like the design: It’s playful and chunky and thoroughly charming. Some may be bummed that the One loses the beanbag look, which is kind of a signature of the line, but I don’t think it’ll make that much difference. The Classic (beanbag) Chumby required a power cable so it’s not like you could toss it around, and luckily the new design is still distinctive and fun — and if you really want the beanbag, it’s not going anywhere. The One is simply joining the Classic, not replacing it.

The Chumby One does lose a few features found in the Chumby Classic — it only has one USB port compared to the Classic’s two, and the formerly stereo 2W dual-speaker set is now mono speaker with the same wattage. The speaker is noticeably more distorted and muddier, and it could use definitely use improvement, although it’s not horrible and is fine at lower volumes.

But the Chumby One also gains 2GB memory (the Classic has 64MB), a li-ion battery (in addition to AC) and a faster processor. I didn’t notice much improvement in speed, but it’s not like it really needs a whole lot of muscle to display weather and news headlines. The Chumby One’s screen also seems sharper than the Classic’s, and the overall package is shorter and narrower, although thicker. Chumby’s selection of widgets, by the way, is quite good, with a huge selection of clocks, social networking services, news, RSS feeds, games and other fun little time wasters.

I’m conflicted about the Chumby One. On the one hand, it’s totally unnecessary — it can’t really do anything a modern smartphone with a dock can’t do better, and at $US100 it’s sort of expensive for an alarm clock. On the other hand, I’m undeniably taken with this thing. It does a good job delivering the time, weather, news and RSS feeds, running Pandora and waking me up, and it looks adorable while doing it. If you’re comfortable dropping $US100 on a little plastic cube of widgets for your bedside table, go for it.

Awesome retro design with clean and simple UI

Runs widgets admirably

Substantial price cut, but not quite impulse-purchase territory

Doesn’t do anything your smartphone can’t

Price

$US30 for the throat mic, $US50 for the controller.

Verdict

Both peripherals are decent, but both could stand a $US10-$15 price drop, too.

The throat mic is pure adolescent fun. You wrap the ring around your neck and stick a headphone in one ear, and you either feel like a special-ops assassin or an erotic asphyxiation aficionado. Either way it’s a joy. Unlike a real throat mic, you actually speak at normal volume rather than whisper. Testing online, I was told my voice sounded “fine”, just like the standard 360 headset. Unfortunately, the audio I received wasn’t quite as good — I noticed an abnormal amount of digital compression in my ear — abnormal but far from inaudible.

The controller, on the other hand, is designed for practicality. Look beyond the green LEDs and the snow camo finish, and you’ll notice two mappable buttons on the underside of the controller. They allow you to relocate the XYAB buttons to a position that won’t require you take any fingers off the analogue sticks. (If you’ve ever tried to aim in an FPS and melee at the same time, you know what I’m talking about.)

At first, I found the controller off-putting just because it’s different from your stock controller. But when I actually played a game with it, I quickly adjusted to less grippy analogue sticks and the somewhat awkward position of the small, mappable buttons.

Still, I’d like to see Mad Catz refine their modded controller. At the moment, it’s wired (be it wired through a very practical nylon woven cord). And as I said, those mappable buttons are pretty minuscule. As long as Mad Catz is breaking the rules of the traditional controller, I’d like to see them create an even more practical, polished rendition.

But if you’re OK with the price and above mentioned limitations, I’d say you can buy either product without resignation. Also, how great is it that mainstream generic controllers are finally incorporating mods and innovative into the mix?

Xbox 360 Throat Communicator

Clear audio out

Functional, faux badass design

Compressed, digital-sounding audio in

Xbox 360 Combat Controller

Controller itself feels decent in your hands

Mappable buttons are as handy as you’d hope

Corded, but the cord itself is premium

Mappable buttons could be larger and better positioned

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.

Price

The Australian RRP is $699.

In case you missed the news, the s1000pj is an utterly unexciting point-and-shoot camera from Nikon, except for one minor detail: it’s got a projector — like a real, don’t-look-straight-into-it lamp projector — built right into its face. This is why it’s funny, why it’s interesting and why we’re writing about it. Moreover, it’s why this camera exists in the first place: as a sort of high-profile tech demo for Nikon.

But first!

And for that matter, foremost! This is a standard point-and-shoot camera, with generally standard point-and-shoot camera specs. Nowadays, that equates to 12.1-megapixel photo resolution, a 5x lens that’s 25mm equivalent on the wide end, built-in vibration reduction and SD storage. A/V connections are served by a single microUSB slot, and the rechargeable battery juices up on a separate charger.

Taking photos on the S1000pj is extremely simple, almost to a fault: ISO and white balance controls, for example, are hidden behind two layers of menus. But for lack of a better word, the point of a point-and-shoot is to make taking OK pictures as easy as possible, which the S1000pj certainly does.

As you can see in the sample gallery, the shots are never spectacular, but never terrible. The Nikon rarely finds a situation where it can’t return a decent shot in auto mode. High ISO performance was a pleasant surprise as well, since Nikon opted for the s1000pj’s sensor to automatically draw down to 3 megapixels during ISO6400 shooting, which keeps the results from being too spectacularly bad. In fact, ISO800 shots are clean enough to print, while ISO400 returns crystal-clear photos, even during longer exposures.

That said, this is still a point-and-shoot, and not even a very high-end one. The lens isn’t spectacularly sharp, and the colours are particularly vivid. The VGA video is dull and mostly lifeless. Button-press-to-shoot time is quick, but still not quite instant. That’s the biggest problem for this camera: It’d be a perfectly acceptable — even above average — point-and-shoot for, say, $US250. It costs a good deal more than that becauuuuuuuuuuse:

Yes, It’s Got a Projector

My love affair with the s1000pj didn’t start until the day after I got it. It was early evening so my room was dim, and I’d only taken a few photos with camera the day before, as I was unboxing and summarily dismissing the camera in a well-lit office. “This projector looks like arse,” I believe I said. “Human arse.”

But when I flicked the little projector button this time — it’s a dedicated switch on top, next to the projector’s manual focus slider — I was stunned. It looked fine. I shut the windows. I backed up, stretching the image to about 40 inches. Now it looked great. This dinky little projector, and hacky and ridiculous as it looks and sounds, is legitimately useful.

It’s an instant wow-piece for anyone who uses it, and a great way to show off photos (and yes, videos) in a bind. And by bind, I mean any time you don’t want to ask everyone where you are to crowd around a computer screen and awkwardly watch while you import photos. Now, you just tell them to dim the lights. That’ll do fine.

Oh, But You Probably Shouldn’t Buy It

It was a tough call not to recommend this outright, but I really can’t, unless you’ve got a wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket, or don’t mind paying a $US150 (rough) premium for the projector. Yes, the camera itself is capable enough. And yes, the projector concept isn’t nearly as ridiculous as most people make it out to be. What’s so appealing about this camera is that it’s nailed what will be, if not a universal feature, something we come to expect in a certain kind of camera before too long.

But that makes this product admirable, not buyable. For the Nikon to be a worthy purchase, we’ll need to see a change: Either the photographic experience itself gets a little closer to what you’d expect for $US430 — about how much you’re going to end up spending on this now — or the camera drops significantly in price.

Nikon is charging a classic early adopter tax, and you won’t just be paying for it in dollars: battery life is predictably bad when using the projector (I could easily lose a quarter of my charge just showing off a set of photos to friends). And this thing isn’t particularly svelte, considering the specs. But if you know what you’re getting into — and now you do — it’s your call.

You will have fun with the Nikon s1000pj, even through the pangs of buyer’s remorse.

The projector is surprisingly decent in low light

Chunky design

Adequate photography

Battery drains very quickly when projecting

Hefty early adopter tax

AU: We’re still waiting on a local release date… _-EH

Price

$US300 with two-year AT&T contract, $US600 à la carte

Verdict

Nokia has built a great netbook, but they’ve done nothing to redefine the genre. Their 10-inch Booklet 3G has your typical 1.6GHz Atom, 120GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM. Running Windows 7, that means the performance is just passable. I’d be this close to pounding my head against the wall when a program would begin installing or a video would load.

That’s typical.

What’s ever so less typical is the sharp, 1.3kg unibody-esque construction (complete with sweet MacBook-like under-hatch battery and a hinge that bends nearly 180 degrees), HDMI output (not that you can really playback HD videos smoothly on an Atom) and of course, solid integrated 3G and integrated GPS (though Nokia’s bundled Ovi software apparently requires a phone or PC to activate, and after 30 minutes of fiddling I honestly gave up on mapping.)

The battery life is impressive, too. In non-stop 3G browsing and app-running with the screen at 80 per cent brightness, the machine’s svelte 16-cell battery ran for a bit over six hours and 30 minutes. That was a strenuous test, and dimming the screen and/or browsing through Wi-Fi should truly be enough to get you through the workday sans-recharge. (For instance, CrunchGear’s John Biggs reported a pretty remarkable 10 hours of movie playback.)

But alas, even for a nice netbook, the Booklet’s price is a bit too opulent for what you’re really getting: an ever-so gussied up version of the same machine you could buy from Acer, Asus, HP, etc, for half the price (before subsidies). Meanwhile, there are plenty of ULV systems in the $US700 range with bigger screens, better performance and portable-minded design (of course, they’ll mostly require 3G dongles).

Give me some rhinestones and a bit more power, then we’ll talk. Or just hand me back my iPhone.

Quality build

Long battery life

Plastic monitor back makes whole thing feel cheaper

It’s still a $US600 netbook