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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2009-11b
News for the teasin' season
Tiffen to pros: Lowel Blender does LED light better
Tiffen made its reputation among the lenserati through glass
filters to shape the light reaching a camera; now the compact
Lowel Blender (street $650) light uses direct control of warm &
cool LEDs to place any desired blend of color temperatures at the
light source. Two knobs control how much warm (tungsten) & how
much cool (daylight) illumination you want this tiny 4"x3"x3"
camera shoe mounted light source to emit. It includes a frost
diffuser to help soften the wash of the light on a subject.
Hilary can get you photos or info. Contact: Hilary Araujo, Tiffen
Company (Hauppauge, NY) 631-273-2500x3216 haraujo@tiffen.com
http:/.tiffen.com
When scrambling for Scrabble don't settle for scrapple
Scrabble players on anybody's shopping list will be thankin'
Franklin & the person who got them The Official Scrabble Player's
Dictionary ($50). Type in your tiles plus those on the board & it
will show your available choices, ranked by word score. Use it to
resolve disputes. Between games, it has a few word games of its
own. For pix, info or review samples of this cool way to get more
smiles out of those tiles, ask Aline. Contact: Aline Boutin,
Franklin Electronic Publishers (Burlington, NJ) 609-386-2500x4434
aline_boutin@franklin.com http://franklin.com
Intel at retail - love on sale
If you're keeping an eye on those magnificently powerful Core-i7
processors at stores with Intel inside, you may be seeing some
surprisingly aggressive savings. Micro Center, for example, just
cut its pricing on the 2.67 GHz Core i7 920 from $350 to $200.
Exploring quad core just got a little more difficult to resist.
Ask Todd. Contact: Todd Garrigues, Intel Americas Inc. (Santa
Clara, CA) 301-497-8997 todd.c.garrigues@intel.com
http://Intel.com
Liberty as a winter gadget
While the Bayalink Liberty ($100) USB key & BlackBerry software
combo is an obvious asset for road warriors, it's also has a less
obvious application for winter months. Should your home or office
power fail, most Internet connections will also go dark. As long
as there's battery left in both your BlackBerry & your notebook,
Liberty can get you connected to the things you need to cope with
either the current emergency or to work that can't wait. Ask
Mark. Contact: Mark Andress, Bayalink Solutions Corp. (Waterloo,
ON) 416-399-4969 mark@bayalink.com http://Bayalink.com
Prediction: addiction
You're a slave in Pittsburgh steel mills, abducted by a flying
saucer, have your brain scooped after being drugged by a cult,
under fire on an icy Alaskan cliff, swarmed by ghouls in a DC
Metro train tunnel & pitted, single-handed, against defenders of
an enemy air base. Did we mention that your entire life parades
before your eyes when a fatal blast becomes the climax of
completing your slain father's life work? All of that just skims
the top of what makes the new Fallout 3 Game of the Year Edition
($50 for Games for Windows, $60 for Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3) so
addictive. It's a top gift for gamers this season; tell Tracey to
get you info, pics, video or s hands-on review copy. Contact:
Tracey Thompson, Bethesda Softworks (Rockville, MD) 301-354-4216
tthompson@bethsoft.com http://BethSoft.com
Special Report: What we learned from Comdex
We can pick up some important lessons from Comdex that very much
apply to the state of consumer electronics today; in fact, it
extends to several industries. This is not about the final
ownership shifts when Shelly cashed out & others took over; this
is about the need for a computer industry trade show disappearing
as the industry itself melted into larger landscapes. Those
around in the early days (perhaps best represented by the
ComputerLand era) may remember that most people driven to want
computers found the purchase of them to be unexpectedly
complicated & scary. In the decades since, computers have been
domesticated, tamed into being appliances, the majority sold in
all manner of walk-in, self-serve retail stores as well as
online. Other areas of consumer electronics have already seen the
same transition. Stereo stores are, but for the high end,
departments or aisles within bigger retailers; stereo gear is
freckled all over the CES floor. A very parallel process has
reshaped camera sales; PMA-goers can recognize the lost energy of
that show. Still, we need to broaden our perspective again,
because this is not just about the economic health of trade
shows; this is about the way that categories, as they emerge into
market success & ubiquity, suffer entropy. "Wannabe" category
marketers who seem to draw spotlights often get that to happen by
blending quirkiness & diversion, not to mention a teaspoon of
snake oil. If you consider the launch of the iPod, you've already
been diverted from the subject, which was really the launch of
iTunes; the snake oil comes when expensive & extensive ad
programs lead consumers to believe that somehow, a product
associated with a silhouetted dancer wearing earbuds will grant
them an ability to be trendy, look cool & become more popular.
The merchandising in that comes right out of the early days of
safety razor blades, the advertising right out of the heyday of
cigarette commercials. If we take an anthropologist's or
historian's view of Comdex, we see that there's a natural process
to product category maturation that leaves only a very few of the
early vendors still relevant, only a very few categories not
extremely vulnerable to competition & none of the products
(including the high-end & specialized IT gear) immune to the same
purchaser considerations (more emotional than logical). Computers
melted into appliances. Travel alarm clocks, calculators, pocket
voice recorders & a lot of other handheld gear melted into
secondary functions of cell phones. Digital picture frames are
fading in favor of picture-showing modes built into other gear.
Wristwatches are still being worn, but more as fashion
accessories than for their horological functions. As we near CES,
keeping those lessons of Comdex in mind, we might add a new
question to our library of responses to new products: Years from
now, what's this thing going to turn into?
Special Report Bonus Review: TxtForward
As we were looking for antidotes to distracted driving, an eager
PR guy told us about TxtForward from Electric Pocket. We got a
copy to review on our BlackBerry Bold (it's also available on
Android & WinMo phones). The basic premise is that it will
forward text messages (incoming certainly, outgoing optionally;
on BlackBerry, it can do the same for PIN messages) to any e-mail
address (or mobile number) you specify. Once it's installed &
configured (surprisingly few clicks), it runs in the background
until you stop it. At the desk, it's a little more convenient
than the handset for seeing & responding to SMS-a-grams; you can
also set an "away" rule (in your desktop e-mail client) to
auto-respond to these messages. It's apparent that this design is
intended more for people with e-mail-centric habits who might
otherwise be a while even noticing a text message has arrived;
that's a fine bit of functionality, but not quite what we hoped
for. It will take a little extra work to configure a "Sounds"
(ringer) profile for driving that keeps silent when text messages
arrive, plus that desktop rule to auto-respond to message senders
("Not now - I'm driving - if it's truly urgent, phone"), but this
is a key piece to making that kind of solution happen. If you're
not driving alone, you might use it to forward a copy of incoming
texts to a passenger, but a more practical solution would be to
simply hand over your phone before you shift out of Park. Bottom
line: Electric Pocket TxtForward provides a useful additional bit
of functionality to smart handsets that can be an important
component in concocting your own antidote to distracted
driving.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: Documents To Go v2 Premium
Documents To Go is one of those lovely transformational
applications that makes a BlackBerry so cool, since it makes it
easy to read & edit Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents. The new
version 2 adds bidirectional sync between folders on the handset
& their paired counterparts on your Windows PC, automatically
updating each with new or changed files. The Premium Edition adds
PDF To Go for viewing PDF files in the handset (without
connecting to an external server). The Premium Edition also turns
on additional functionality, letting you also create files,
perform spell checks advanced formatting & more. We recommend
caution in using this, because it's so easy to underestimate how
big a collection of documents has aggregated on a user's
Terabyte-scale hard drive while overestimating what a few
Gigabytes of SD card can hold. We're finding it useful to create
a special "2go" folder tree on our Windows PC, pruning its
contents from time to time to keep our mobile collections
current; your needs may be very different. Bottom line: New
Documents To Go version 2 Premium Edition gives us the feel &
functionality of outfitting the best parts of Office into our
BlackBerry handset, which is one more reason we're much less
likely to tote a notebook any more.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: talking/listening clock radio
We love quirky, especially when it comes in the middle of
tedious. We were doing our annual chore of dredging through the
CES exhibitor listings & chatting with some of those who might
have hidden treasures. We found one when talking to Spectra
International, which offers products in a few CE categories under
the Jensen brand (among others). We learned about something
that's cool enough to be a candidate for the holidays. The Jensen
JCR-290 Smart Talk Interactive AM/FM Talking Dual Alarm Clock
Radio with Voice Recognition (just writing the full name of it
takes away any element of surprise) has a big, blue display, a
smidge larger than a dollar bill. You call its name ("Smart
Talk"), it responds ("Yes") & then you can ask it to tell you the
time, set the time, check the status on both alarms, set either
alarm (both time & sound: beep, radio, ocean, rain or brook), set
a sleep time, select a sleep sound or set the display to bright
or dim. If you choose a sound other than the radio, you can also
voice command it to snooze or turn the alarm off; those are a
little trickier to make happen, which isn't the worst thing in
the world if your goal is to eventually wake up. Everything you
can do by voice, we should add, you can also do with its topside
buttons & see on the front display. We found it a little chintzy
that the batteries for its battery backup are 2032 coin cells
(not standard AAA or AA cells) & are not included. The radio
tuning & volume have to be set manually (these are not
voice-interactive). An auxiliary audio input disables the radio &
substitutes the audio source you plug into it, but there are no
on/off or shuttle controls for that input (the unit presumes it
is omnipresent). The audio quality is what you'd expect from a
small speaker in a plastic case, as good as most clock radios but
nothing to thrill an audio purist; come to think of it, an audio
purist is a bit more likely to be roused from slumber if the
audio is a bit less than pristine, so perhaps that was a design
goal. Bottom line: in the world of dual-alarm clock radios, the
Jensen JCR-290 Smart Talk Interactive AM/FM Talking Dual Alarm
Clock Radio with Voice Recognition can do what you tell it
instead of making you fiddle with buttons that you never can
quite remember or read in the dark.
Next week: Fake Comdex
In memory of all the past November weeks we lost to Comdex, we've
declared the week of November 16 to be "Fake Comdex" week & plan
to run some special slugs here about new hardware, software &
peripheral products - the kind of info that always flooded us. We
invite you to join us with your own Fake Comdex theme coverage.
Drop Marty a note to get a short list of coverage candidates by
e-mail on Monday. Contact: Martin Winston, Newstips (Novelty, OH)
440-338-8400; marty@Newstips.com http://Newstips.com
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Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com
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