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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2009-02b
News to fall in love with
WildCharge in the wild saves plugs, power, jacking around WildCharge is that pad with metallic stripes that lets you charge handheld gear just by putting it onto the pad; okay, we exaggerated, it takes a teensy bit more than that. The underlying cool tech involves a special connector geometry, which you can get either through a special skin (they cover the BlackBerry Pearl & Curve already, with more coming) or a small adapter (those so far are specialized, but a generic USB-A female will soon let just about anything plug in). While the "how" of the tech is cool, the "why bother" is even cooler: one pad can fully support the charging needs of 5-6 devices without hogging 5-6 outlets with wall warts. On the other hand, it does make some charges disappear because unlike most charging gear, when it isn't charging anything, it isn't spinning your electric meter. One more curiosity: while you'll see this tech on more & more shelves, it will always be under somebody else's brand name. Ask George. Contact: George Holmes, WildCharge, Inc. (Boulder, CO) 208-720-2707 gbholmes@wildcharge.com http://wildcharge.com
Add pushcasts to a BlackBerry with Chalk We're a little late getting around to Chalk Media (just acquired by RIM) but what they do is no less significant for our tardiness. They're all about pushcasts, mostly for training, using a dedicated handset inbox to receive multimedia-rich content & tracking personal progress in reviewing it. These are easy to author, even with things like PowerPoint (thanks to a provided plug-in); they also provide survey & quiz wizards. Mobile Chalkboard (reviewers: Brooke Van Hatten bvanhatten@chalk.com 604-453-8650) is made for enterprise users, but they can set you up for a demo; if that means you'll need a BlackBerry handset, Ms. Berry is very happy to see if she can help you. Contact: Victoria Berry, Research in Motion (Waterloo, ON) 519-888-7465x73663 vberry@rim.com http://rim.com
Unify4Life springing PS3 dongle Your BlackBerry can substitute for the Sony keypad & remote control a PS3 with the new Unify4Life Game Shadow dongle & software (April $40) coming out this spring. If you're already using the AV Shadow ($99) to remote control your AV gear, this adds a PS3 main menu item to the menu on the BlackBerry, giving you easy access to a broad slate of PS3 functionality. Ask Chris. Contact: Chris Kreuch, Unify4Life Corporation (Markham, ON) 905-940-1117x311 ckreuch@unify4life.com http://Unify4Life.com
FlyCast a dark cloud over satellites While the atmospheric metaphor may be altitude-twisted, FlyCast is starting to add materially to the pressures on subscription satellite radio operations. In this economy, one of the biggest factors is cost; satellite comes with a monthly fee while FlyCast is free & FlyCast runs on gear (often more than one piece of gear) most people already own. FlyCast gets reception wherever you can connect to the cloud, even places where you've never heard the orbital birds. FlyCast is expanding its channel count while satellites are not. Satellites do have an advantage on those big-dollar star-power channels & many fans of those shows may well keep their subscriptions going just for those, but even for them, FlyCast gives those fans more to listen to the rest of the day without having to pay. Ask Roy. Contact: Roy Smith, FlyCast (Lancaster, PA) 717-846-0499 roys@flycast.fm http://FlyCast.fm
Nobex turns Outlook e-mail signatures into contacts Nobex Contacts (http://nobexcontacts.com free trial; $34) is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that recognizes a sender's signature block within an incoming message & with a click, transports that info to a new Outlook Contacts record. Yep, it's from the same company that puts Nobex Radio Companion on the BlackBerry. Both are irresistible, so why are you being so aloof? Contact: Gadi Mazor, Nobex Incorporated (Santa Cruz, CA) 831-621-1823 gadi@nobexinc.com http://NobexRC.com
Special Report: Tapping cheapskates Home & hardware stores know that when new home construction goes down, home improvement projects generally step up; is the same true for the tech categories? Looking at the personal side of the computer industry, it's hard to say, because the spending slumps of the past have all been minor, in part because they all happened before market saturation played a factor. That isn't true today, as sales of new computers remain down after several months of slide. If the "Home Depot" factor plays in the PC segment, we'll soon see some pick-up in retail sales of hard drives & perhaps memory. (For a segment of the user population, that may also extend to retrofitting new CPUs, motherboards, slot cards or power supplies). We're already seeing a lot of traction for free applications on smart handsets; surprisingly, few developers have any clue as to when or whether they'll be able to migrate into a more manifest revenue stream. The point & shoot camera brands have very little backstop in add-on or accessory products, so they're compelled to fight the battle at the retail front; as we saw over Christmas, the only theory that seemed to work placed an emphasis on their lowest price points. Most of the products you (or we) cover suffer in this economy, so it's important to remember that the marketplace isn't about the products but about the people who might consider buying them. As bad as the economic news legitimately is & appears, a lot of the slowdown in purchasing is more a result of hunker-in-the-bunker FUD factors than of money not being available at all. People are spending cautiously; they're not afraid (in fact, they may be a little prod) of being considered cheapskates. That's vulnerability from one perspective, opportunity from another. If the drive with all the tunes you bough crashes, how much money are you out? A self-avowed cheapskate may be proud of spending a hundred bucks on a backup drive as cheaper than the potential loss. Should you spend $1500 to replace a notebook PC when you can get almost the same functionality from a new smart handset for a lot less? Cheapskates spent a lot of money on hybrid cars to save how little per month at the pump? We tend to think of cheapskates as being one-dimensional, but the reality is that they're an often dormant part of each of us. True, some clever marketers will find ways to take unfair advantage of that; but it's also true that a few good examples & clever advice in our mutual coverage areas may actually produce some good both for & as a result of this often-demeaned category.
I7 project: Beefy & less beefy The I7 is something like cramming 4 Maseratis under the hood of a VW Beetle. Its ability to run 8 threads across 4 cores while directly addressing triplets of DDR3 memory & bringing other previously external functionality on-chip while managing power on 16 fronts is both amazing & welcome. Intel sent us two I7 processors for this project: one the 920 (2.66GHz), the other the 965 Extreme (3.2GHz). Either CPU will lend itself quite readily to overclocking, but we won't be doing that. Like other recent Intel processors, the I7 will slow down its clock rate to avoid severe damage should overheating occur; the thermal design power of the I7 is 130W. Since we've had some bad experiences with overheating earlier when an active cooling solution failed, we wanted to make sure we could identify several alternatives; we have & will be reviewing them separately. We recognize that throwing these numbers at you is something like trying to describe the ride of a Rolls Royce by telling you about its pistons; the only point we really want to make is that of the two systems we're building, one starts out being about 20% faster than the other. Will this make any real-world difference when we fire up the simple combination of using Office applications while doing HD video editing? That's what this entire multi-part series is designed to report.
Special Report Bonus Review: Fellowes Body Glove for Bold We think of Fellowes as a brand for office products, especially desk accessories, but their new Body Glove line is more about accessories for the gear you use when you leave your desk behind. They sent us their new Body Glove Fitted Phone Case for the BlackBerry 9000 Bold, specifically the snap-on hard case version with a textured glove material outer lining & a felt-like inside back panel. A clever arrangement fills an oval back cut-out with either a flush plug or a knob; the knob slides onto a crafty dual-purpose gizmo that can either be a rotating belt clip or (when you flip open its kickstand) an easel-like angled mount click-stops to keep the handset visible over a variety of slants. As a protective solution, this is interesting & flexible, though it makes the handset about 75% thicker, which tips the scale against long-term comfortable use. Bottom line: the Fellowes Body Glove Fitted Phone Case for the BlackBerry 9000 Bold is a solid-feeling, nicely appointed protective case that offers more than the usual variety of options for toting or resting the phone; it's a classy way to stop bumps & bruises from making the handset déclassé.
Special Report Bonus Review: 2 Anycom Bluetooth gizmos When we asked Anycom for their car kits to review, a couple of other Bluetooth gizmos slipped into the package. One is their PM-400 Bluetooth Printer Adapter, which offers a choice of LPT or USB connectors to attach a printer up to 30 feet away from the Bluetooth-enabled desktop or notebook (SPP & HCRP profiles supported) doing the printing & lets that happen without running a cable between them. On the less geeky side of life, FIPO plugs into any of the zillion pieces of audio gear designed to dock an iPod to stream Bluetooth-connected audio & respond to shuttle controls (A2DP & AVRCP profiles). Now you don't need an iPod to take advantage of all those special added iPod support features as long as you have a desktop, notebook, handheld or other piece of Bluetooth gear ready to play your tunes. Bottom line: We like the Bluetooth cleverness that Anycom displays in offering the FIPO & the PM-400 Bluetooth Printer Adapter.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: T.R.U.E. cooler One of the I7 (socket 1366) CPU cooler solutions we got in is commonly called "T.R.U.E." because of its full name: Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme. 6 heat pipes route through each side of the thermal exchange block atop the CPU, then through a 4.25" stack of 52 roughly (they're not rectangular) 2"x5" cooling fins, spaced 2mm apart. Opposite corners of each fin are bent slightly upward or downward, which helps promote a small amount of third-dimension air flow. The bottom fin is 1.75" from the top of the CPU, which helps clear whatever's underneath on the mother board. There are both underside & top-side bracket elements to help distribute the load of the 28.5-ounce fin array plus the 8.25-ounce companion 120mm fan (which comes with a clawed bracket to attach to clamp onto the fin stack). When properly mounted, the top of the fan bracket is at or just below the level of the heat pipe terminations at the top of the fin array (any higher could make closing the case a challenge). If you're old enough, you may find this big stack of fins & fan reminiscent of coolers coming through the hood in the old hot rod era. You don't have to have had a lot of physics to recognize the solid thermodynamic approach of this design & tests we've seen of previous (pre-socket-1366) models always rank it in one or another of the top 3 spots in cooling efficiency. Bottom line: We're impressed with the design, construction & performance of the socket 1366 Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme (T.R.U.E.) cooling solution.
Special Report Bonus Review 4: Antec 1000W TruePower Quattro Have you added anything to your PC since you bought it? Did you upgrade the drives or the graphics card, populate one of the card slots, add or upgrade an optical drive or the memory or plug anything into an initially unpopulated USB port? Any one of these little changes results in a change in loading on the system power supply & swapping a power supply can become a fairly major operation. Each of our I7 project systems uses an Antec 1000Watt TruePower Quattro power supply. Out here in the maple sugar hills east of Cleveland, the power lines don't always deliver at spec; anything between 100-240VAC keeps these boys happy, but they don't waste the juice, maintaining at least 80% energy efficiency at 20-100% of load. The cables are sleeved (to help improve air flow) & there are plenty of them: 9 for 4-pin hard drives or other internal peripherals, 8 for SATA drives, 2 for floppy drives, 1 ATX-12V, 2 PCIe-6+2, 2 PCIe, 1 EPS12V & a 20+4 motherboard connector. The PCIe & SATA power cables plug into sockets on the power supply, so you don't have to populate cables you're not using & you have the flexibility to change that later. The Quattro in the product name comes, we assume, from the 4 separate 12VDC output rails; this arrangement keeps high temporary loads (like when drive motors kick in) from having a negative impact across an entire system. It's hard to imagine a system - even with a quad-core CPU, multiple graphics cards & a stack of drives - that this power supply can't take in stride. On the other hand, when operations aren't demanding all that juice all at once, we think it's nice that they made its fan speed thermally aware, so it quiets down when there's less to huff & puff about. Bottom line: the Antec 1000Watt TruePower Quattro power supply cures all the frustrations we've ever had with lesser supplies & adds clever, welcome touches of its own to both its control over power & its cabled delivery of it.
Special Report Bonus Review 5: X-Pad Slim If you were a kid in the Howdy Doody generation (if not, ask your folks), one popular doodad of that era was the folding-leg metal tray that let us slurp our soup in bed when we were sick, or munch our Frosted Flakes in front of the cartoons on TV on a Saturday morning. These days, the only thing likely to be on our lap that isn't a kiddy or a kitty is a notebook PC with its own, higher levels of body heat. A while back we looked at the Edova Innovations X-Pad, a flat surface with raised corners that put some air flow between the laptop & the lap. Now, it looks like they sent that model to school to learn thermodynamics. The new X-Pad Slim looks to be about 40% less thick (it's now just 0.5" tall) & the corner risers now have both top & side venting for even better airflow. It's also a little wider at 10.5"x14.5" so typical 17" laptops fit just fine. The bottom has changed from a felt-feel surface to a rubber-feel surface that's probably a bit less likely to let something slip, though that's more likely to happen because of whatever clothing covers your lap than because of this tray. Bottom line: the new X-Pad Slim has enough significant little improvements to warrant a look for folks who don't like when their thighs start to cook.
When GoDaddy became No-Go, Daddy-o The mystery arrives as we sent out last week's issue & got 17 bounce messages telling us that we were sending either viruses or spamming; to confound the investigation, no 2 domains were the same. All 17, it turns out, were GoDaddy domains. Their Director of Abuse, Ben Butler, looked into it & reports that one of the URLs we listed was linked to an IP showing up on the Spamhaus black list (but removed from Spamhaus shortly after). We still believe their action was unnecessarily intrusive into righteous & legitimate communications & was escalated into a bad act when they failed to include any identification of the GoDaddy role in blocking it or any avenue of recourse in the bounce message their system returns. We even suggested alternatives, like delaying instead of blocking transmission so temporary Spamhaus listings would be less intrusive, or breaking trigger URLs with a string that says the URL is currently on a Spamhaus black list. So bad marks to GoDaddy for their handling of our (your) e-mail & for not identifying themselves or providing recourse in the bounce messages, but good marks for being timely & candid in identifying what happened & sharing it with us. We asked to be placed on a permanent white list; we'll see if they comply. 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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