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2009-11B

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

                               # # #

Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com

(c) Copyright 2007 Martin Winston and TwandaCorp - all rights reserved.

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