Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin       Issue # 2008-05d

           May we leave with news

Now Droplet cell video goes both ways
 The Dick Tracy 2-way wrist TV may be getting a little closer to
 reality. The promise of the Bell Labs picture phone may be
 getting a little closer to your pocket. Droplet development now
 has 2-way video communications happening over cell phone
 bandwidths. That's in the lab today, with no forecast yet for
 deployment, but it smells close. Ask John. Contact: John Ralston,
 DROPLET TECHNOLOGY (Menlo Park, CA) 650-688-5762
 mailto:ralston@droplet-tech.com http://droplet-tech.com Agency
 contact: Evan Kennedy (Terpin) 310-821-6100x116 evan@terpin.com

Summer tip: lighting softens glare
 We'll ask you to remember those images you'd rather forget, in
 photos or videos taken in the harsh summer sun; ironically, a
 little more light can make those better. If the sun is behind
 your subject (making for a glamour glow in the hair, by the way),
 auto-exposure is likely to leave the facial details so dark it's
 like shooting through mud. If the sun is to one side, it's again
 autoexposure that can yield a photo so high contrast it looks
 like half the face was posterized. In both cases, a Litepanels
 Micro LED-array camera light ($300) can do wonders with wondrous
 ease. If you wonder at the truth of that, isn't it wonderful that
 Ken's so willing to place review units? Ask him. Contact: Ken
 Fisher, LITEPANELS, INC. (North Hollywood CA) 818-332-3070
 mailto:ken@litepanels.com http://LitePanels.com

Samson Media One monitors rock in performance & pricing
 It is almost sacrilegious to suggest that studio quality monitor
 speakers can ever be had in this price range, but even devout
 audio purists have to acknowledge the unflavored audio
 transparency of the new Samson Media One line of monitors. Some
 of the inherent fidelity of these marvelous monitors derives from
 their multi-polar passive crossovers yielding linear response
 across the audio spectrum; there is also a significant
 contribution from their tuned housings. Each pair features a
 front-panel level control, headphone jack & stereo input jack.
 Each speaker features AV shielding, a 25mm silk dome high
 frequency driver & a durable black satin finish. Media One is
 shipping now in 3 sizes: model 3a (3" woofer, 15 Watts/side;
 online $100/pair), model 4a (4" woofer, 20 Watts/side; online
 $150/pair) & model 5a (5" woofer, 20 Watts/side; online
 $200/pair). Hearing is believing, so ask Mark for 2 to review.
 Contact: Mark Wilder, SAMSON TECHNOLOGIES (Hauppauge, NY)
 631-784-2200x142 mailto:mwilder@samsontech.com
 http://SamsonTech.com

Cops arrested by myPower ALL Plus
 Marty lives in a rural community so much like Mayberry you could
 cry, so when he recently stopped to jaw with his pal the police
 chief, one of the topics that came up was the miserable battery
 life they were getting from their notebook PCs. Understand, of
 course, that these things ride around in the cruisers in all
 kinds of miserable weather (unlike Mayberry, most of the kinds of
 weather we get here are miserable) & often get drained to death.
 No matter; we arranged for the chief to try the piggyback pair of
 a Tekkeon MP3450 myPower ALL Plus (online $130) & companion
 MP3450-10 second 50 Watt-hour lithium polymer battery pack. That
 more than solved the problem. The pair not only keeps the
 notebooks running (even those with "goner" batteries), it adds a
 USB charging port for the officers' cell phones. Additional units
 are now on the Township's shopping list. You don't have to be a
 cop to get a laptop that won't stop; review the case yourself.
 Contact: René Williams, TEKKEON, INC. (Tustin, CA) 949-360-7770
 mailto:rene@tekkeon.com http://Tekkeon.com

How to pimp a zBoost
 While most people are entirely happy with the results they get
 with a standard zBoost dual-band cell signal helper ($400), some
 are born hot-rodders intent on kicking things up a notch. The
 zBoost is essentially 3 pieces: a signal booster in the middle, a
 signal capture antenna mounted wherever the most signal can be
 found & a signal relay antenna that goes where people want to be
 using their cell phones. Check the Web site to explore the
 higher-gain directional antenna options for signal acquisition &
 the signal-shaping options on the relay antenna. Installers seem
 to quickly get a knack for all this & geeks tweak until they
 shriek, but reviewers get to try any combination they want just
 to see what changes. Ask the ladies. Contact: Sharon Cuppett,
 WI-EX INC. (Norcross, GA) 770-239-5475x6380
 mailto:scuppett@wi-ex.com http://wi-ex.com AGENCY CONTACT: Deanna
 Anderson 404-759-1890 mailto:danderson705@comcast.net

Special Report: When wider goes wider
 Between the announced BlackBerry 9000 Bold & the so-far
 unannounced next-generation iPhone, both due by fall, both
 through AT&T, it's pretty obvious that when AT&T plays coy on
 when they'll be introducing the wider cellular data bandwidths to
 support these handsets, it's smoke. Their executives, we note,
 are (unlike their spokespeople) already on record saying the
 implementation will be ready when the handsets are ready;
 handsets being "ready", of course, is governed more by their
 acceptance by the carrier than by the usual
 design-to-manufacturing process delays. So we can easily surmise
 that significantly higher data bandwidths will be "in the wild"
 by later this year. These bandwidths are not needed for getting
 you e-mail or IM messages more rapidly, or even a perceived need
 for transferring photo files back & forth. So why go wider? The
 first user brag point (meaning, competitive claim) will be faster
 Web browsing; the next is likely to be real-time person-to-person
 video, perhaps in both directions at once. In the US at least,
 precedent tells us that the drivers are not likely to be the
 ability to watch TV or movies or porn on the phone, nor even much
 to watch or listen to streams (though that may become a bit more
 popular). So much for the content & application facets, but what
 might this mean operationally? We don't have firm data on the new
 iPhone, but we do on the BlackBerry Bold. We know that it has a
 much higher resolution display, a significantly faster & more
 powerful CPU & a somewhat higher-capacity battery, as well as
 built-n GPS & WiFi & Bluetooth & background operations & other
 small sips at the power pool. We know that higher data transfer
 rates involve a marginally higher drain rate on the battery. We
 also know that for any given battery capacity, the more you use
 the phone for activities other than calls, the less talk time is
 left. These new & extra features are very likely to compel more
 user involvement with the handset (which, of course, they are
 designed to do), enough to likely outweigh the extra battery
 capacity. There may be some complaints, but more prevalent than
 that, we think, will be a new round of accessories to address
 that. Charging docks today are primarily a desktop category; we
 expect to see more of them in mobile applications (with more
 powered car docks) & a spate of innovative new personal portable
 charging docks. We expect to see third-party boosted-capacity
 batteries. But the one thing we don't expect to see is a user
 base willing to turn anything off.

Special Report Bonus Review: Trapster
 Social networking meets CB radio in a new (still Beta) venue that
 warns you about speed traps, police enforcement hiding places,
 speed cameras & red light cameras. Trapster gets that data from
 its users, making it available to other users in a variety of
 ways, including an application for BlackBerry (requires GPS). You
 can set it to run behind other applications & it will warn you
 (through spoken voice messages or a wav file of your choice) as
 you near any of these areas of potential inconvenience; you can
 also configure the warning distance & the degree of confidence in
 reporting (for each warning type) necessary to trigger an alert.
 It's free. We try to review products that can help you stay
 productive; we think this fits. It not only helps you avoid
 losing time to tickets or warnings if you do happen to be
 speeding, it also helps alert you to those stretches of road that
 are so imperiled by speeders that enforcement has become
 necessary. (Also consider, if the speeders have Trapster, they're
 more likely to slow down & reduce your peril). Bottom line: it's
 as useful a utility for daily commutes as it is for longer trips
 or business travel.

Special Report Bonus Review 2: Nobex Radio Companion
 We can name that tune in 1 click! The free Nobex Radio Companion
 application on BlackBerry can show you the name of the song, the
 artist & the album art for what's on your favorite radio station
 right now, or what's played recently (both music & commercials).
 You can set it up for as many cities & as many stations as you
 like. If you really, really want to snag that tune for your
 collection, click on it & it gathers album information then sends
 an e-mail message (you choose which e-mail address; we recommend
 your desktop) with links to let you buy it from Amazon or iTunes.
 We tried clicking for more info when it showed an HD Radio
 commercial had played, but it didn't respond; that's probably a
 good thing. Bottom line: Nobex Radio Companion reduces the
 process of figuring out what song it was that interested you,
 looking up the artist & the album & finding a place to buy it
 (when you want to) all to just one click; we like that.

Special Report Bonus Review 3: Neosistec CarFinder
 This isn't about shopping for a new car; it's about remembering
 where you parked or any other temporarily important location,
 like a meet-back-here spot. There are some wonderful BlackBerry
 GPS navigator programs that can get you where you're going across
 vast distances; you may not want to have to launch one just to
 find your way back to wherever the heck it was you parked the
 car. The free Neosistec CarFinder application for BlackBerry is
 about as simple as a GPS can get: you save the location when you
 leave the car so it can guide you back to the car later. It can
 get you there either by using BlackBerry maps or (this is cool)
 with a compass display that treats your parking spot as if it
 were North, Note that you do have to have GPS (embedded or via
 Bluetooth), it does need to be able to "see" its satellites (so
 it may not work with indoor parking) & the compass doesn't have
 any idea of direction until you move a step or two. Also, this
 takes you back to where you parked; if your car was stolen, it
 doesn't take you to the car. One nice feature is that you can
 e-mail that location info to others, so for example, family
 members doing round-robin car sharing can skip the hunting.
 Bottom line: whether or not your car has one of those "I found
 it" bumper stickers, CarFinder makes zeroing in on where you
 parked it a lot less stressful & a bit more fun.

Special Report Bonus Review 4: Oppo upscaling DVD player
 Having heard a lot of claims about up-scaling a standard (red
 laser) DVD producing results as good as a high-def (a la Blu-Ray)
 DVD, we wanted to see it for ourselves. Our vehicle for the test
 is an Oppo DV981HD player with upscaling courtesy of Faroudja
 video processing & an HDMI output. We chose a 2001 release
 ("Super Troopers") for the test & found a noticeable difference
 in the effect of the upscaling on the image on our HDTV set, but
 we wouldn't call it comparable to Blu-Ray. The difference is
 similar to what you see when something old & familiar is
 digitally remastered, with everything a little crisper & a little
 more vibrant than before. Bottom line: whether or not you have a
 Blu-Ray player, when you play your red-laser DVDs, this Oppo
 upscaling DVD player can make them nicer to watch than before.

Special Report Bonus Review 5: Cricket
 We gave a Cherry Pick to the Cricket, a little plastic thing
 about the size of a wax paper box that unfolds to act as an
 easel-type stand for notebook PCs with a choice of front angles
 for the keyboard & attendant riser heights for the screen. When
 mounted on a Cricket, the laptop's keyboard angles up & the
 screen rides high. There are some challenges to typing on it at
 any angle, though in some restricted spaces that might be better
 than any other approach to typing; this may make sense for
 presentation environments where your script comes up closer to
 eye level & there are only a few keys you ever need to stroke.
 The fold/unfold action is clever; for example, when folded,
 magnets keep the leg ends together. We don't know of another
 solution that's quite as nimble when it comes to reducing the
 desktop footprint of a notebook. Bottom line: Cricket is an
 interesting alternative for any notebook user who's ever
 confronted with either a shortage of desktop real estate or a
 need to squat in order to see the screen.

Are we entering a bad health boom?
 Can gas give you gas? There's a logical trail from what's
 happening in the world right now to what could be happening to
 people around you (if not, we hope, you or your family) before
 the year ends. When high gas prices & a fetid economy combine,
 the money to get to work has to come out of somewhere & digging
 into savings or debt lasts only so long. Elective travel is first
 to go, entertainment spending gets cut way back as does
 recreation spending (a factor we'll come back to in a second).
 The family has to eat, but the high costs of fresh vegetables,
 fruits, dairy & meat products will compel a lot of families to
 downgrade. With a huge potential for less well-balanced, ergo
 less healthy diets, we open a first door to disease. For many,
 those cuts in recreation spending mean less involvement in
 routine fitness activities, another opening door. When money's
 tight, the time between visits for routine medical exams or
 treatments tends to stretch out. And there's a well-documented
 link between vulnerability to disease & depression (the personal
 kind, not the economic kind, though in this case, the economy may
 be at its root). Bad health, if you'll pardon the obvious, is
 often contagious. So as summer ends & colder weather begins to
 set in, as kids gather en masse in schoolyards to
 cross-contaminate each other & as we all decide that sweaters are
 cheaper than heating bills, we anticipate a very visible up-trend
 in ill health. We're not mentioning this because there's a
 coverage topic for you (not your beat, is it?) but because it's a
 circumstance that, if addressed early enough, can keep you from
 sharing that fate. Contact: Martin Winston, NEWSTIPS (Novelty,
 OH) 440-338-8400; mailto:marty@newstips.com http://Newstips.com

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