SOME SLEEK WOODEN SPEAKERS FOR YOUR EARS
Students used to go to college with an enormous pair of stereo speakers housed in wood cabinets. Back then, most speaker makers favored wood because it radiated a rich, warm sound.
Now several companies offer wooden earbud headphones, claiming that they recreate that natural resonance for iPods and other portable audio devices. Can it possibly work?
It did in a pair of Rain headphones from Thinksound (US$100, but you can get them for US$59.12 at Amazon). They deliver a balanced, natural resonance that is lacking in many headphones for portable audio players. The Rain earbuds use a 9mm driver and fit snugly in your ear to create passive noise reduction that filters out ambient noise. (Thinksound provides four sets of silicone ear inserts to ensure a good fit for a range of ear sizes.)
The in-ear headphones are quite compact and have a simple, elegant design in two finishes: black chocolate and silver cherry. One of the company’s founders, Aaron Fournier, was previously a lead audio engineer for Tivoli Audio, and the headphones look like portable cousins of the company’s hardwood table radios.
A WII-FRIENDLY DRAWING TOOL FOR THE VERY YOUNG ARTIST
The versatile Wii Remote can be snapped inside a steering wheel or guitar, so why not a graphics tablet? The uDraw GameTablet (US$70) offers a 4-by-6-inch drawing area that children can use with the Wii to draw pictures in charcoal or opaque water colors.
This is no Wacom tablet. There’s a slight lag when splotching paint, and you can’t import digital photos. But you can control things like the opacity of lines and the level of paint drop-off. The tablet, which runs on included uDraw Studio software, lets the artist zoom in to create fine detail.
It exports projects in JPG format to an SD memory card, and there’s a mesmerizing replay feature that reviews paintings, one stroke at a time. So if your children don’t like what’s on TV, they can draw their own.
Planned for release in November, the tablet is part of a series that the game publisher THQ hopes will transform living rooms into artist studios. Two other US$30 titles include Pictionary, where you sketch clues, and Dood’s Big Adventure, where you draw and tilt through game levels.
HOME SECURITY WEBCAMS, AFFORDABLE AND SIMPLE
L ogitech has a line of new home-monitoring Webcams, available next month, that are easy to set up and deliver high-resolution video for a consumer-level camera. The cameras come in two versions — the US$300 Alert 750i Master System for indoor use and the weatherproof US$350 Alert 750e Outdoor Master System. Once the “master” camera is installed, up to five more cameras can be installed at a cost of US$230 each for indoor and US$280 each for outdoor models.
Each camera comes with its own networking kit, which uses existing electrical wiring and outlets to connect the camera to a home network. They require broadband Internet.
The cameras capture video at a resolution of 960 by 720 pixels at a maximum 15 frames a second.
They have motion sensors and dispatch an e-mail alert when they detect activity. The live video, but not recorded events, can be viewed via a secure, and free, Web site. The cameras also have a built-in microphone.
Setup is a simple three-step process. After installation, the camera records video to an included two-gigabyte MicroSD memory card when it senses motion.
The recorded video is automatically backed up to the PC connected to the network.
PUTTING COLOR IN AN E-READER
Dedicated e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Sony’s Reader, have one thing in common: They all use black and white screen technology from a company called E Ink. That’s one reason a company called MerchSource thinks it has a shot at grabbing some e-reader market share. The company announced this week its full-color e-reader, the Literati, which is expected to go on sale in October.
MerchSource develops and sells products under well-known brands, including Animal Planet, Emerson and Vivitar. For the Literati, the company struck a licensing deal with The Sharper Image. The Wi-Fi-only Literati costs about US$159 including a case, US$20 more than Amazon’s 6-inch Kindle Wi-Fi model. The device, powered by Kobo’s e-book engine, has two million titles available through Kobo’s library.
MerchSource wants to make this simple for consumers, so it preloads 25 public domain books onto the device before purchase, and provides a coupon code to download an additional 125 public domain titles at no cost.
The 7-inch LCD screen is bright, with saturated colors. But the battery provides only about six hours of use.
AT US$200, THE ECHO BETTER NOT BE AN ORDINARY PEN
It’s the kind of pen you’d expect James Bond to use on the renewal form for his license to kill. It’s got a camera inside, and a microphone, and it costs a small fortune, as pens go. But the Livescribe Echo isn’t designed for secret agents. It’s for doctors, lawyers, and diligent college students, and maybe even the occasional well-heeled journalist.
This US$200 pen, which went on sale last month, is a revealing example of what can happen when you take one of life’s most mundane devices and slip in a few microchips.
Livescribe squeezed a processor, 8 gigabytes of memory, and an organic light-emitting diode screen into a pen not much bigger than a Sharpie. It’s an innovative effort to apply digital technology to the analog task of taking notes.
The company claims it has sold half a million of its pens in the past two years — mostly, an older, cheaper model called the Pulse. About a third of all buyers are students; the rest are business people who can ill afford misunderstandings caused by badly scribbled notes. With an Echo, you can make sure you got it right.
Say you are scribbling away during a sales presentation. The Livescribe Echo’s camera, mounted near the pen’s tip, captures an image of your handwriting. At the same time, it is making an audio recording of the words you are hearing. And the pen’s processor synchronizes the audio to the written text.
The pen can read what you write — it even deciphered my handwriting, which isn’t easy.
After the meeting, tap the pen on one of your written notes, and hear a clip from that moment. No need to replay the whole recording to double-check a questionable note on page three; just tap and listen to the part that matters.
Next, plug the Echo into a Windows or Macintosh computer and install its desktop software. Up pops a digital image of your handwritten notes. You can convert the image to a standard PDF file and e-mail it to colleagues, along with the audio recording. You can even combine them in a single file called a “pencast,” in which your notes appear in sync with the audio playback.
Like a smartphone, the Echo runs apps, or mini-programs that you can buy at the Livescribe Web site. The most impressive ones are the dictionaries.
Can’t remember the meaning of the word “syzygy?” Write it down and launch the American Heritage English Dictionary. A digital voice will pronounce the word, while its definition scrolls through the digital display on the side of the pen. Now switch to the Spanish dictionary. Write an English word, and tap. Up pops the Spanish translation, written and spoken.
Limitations? Afraid so. The Livescribe is just another pen unless you write on a special paper covered with almost invisible dots. It’s the dots that the camera reads, not the ink on the page. The pages also contain visual command icons that must be tapped to launch the pen’s various features.
You can print your own special dot paper using ordinary copy paper, if you own a color laser printer. An inkjet won’t do. Luckily, dot paper isn’t hard to find. A four-pack of large notebooks sells for US$20.
In addition, the Echo’s microphone needs work. It clearly picks up the sound of the pen scratching across the paper, but sometimes doesn’t do as well with human voices. A Livescribe executive said an optional US$30 external microphone solves this problem, though I haven’t tested it for myself.
And of course, there is the price. It’s not so bad, given the Echo’s remarkable features. But I lose several pens a week and would hate to misplace one that costs as much as a good cellphone. But then, I am not Livescribe’s target market. I am too absent-minded. The Echo, while not perfect, is a pen for perfectionists.
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