Green Power

by David English on January 24th, 2009

You don’t usually associate bicycles with consumer electronics, but it seemed appropriate for Schwinn to have a booth this year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). One of the CES themes was green technology, so Schwinn showed its latest eBike, the Tailwind.

It’s a pedal-assisted electric bike with a range of 25 to 30 miles on a battery charge. You can fully charge the bike in about 30 minutes using a standard power plug, or as little as 5 to 7 minutes using a 40 amp commercial charger.

You can charge the Tailwind’s Toshiba SCiB battery a minimum of 2,000 times, compared with previous electric bike batteries, which could be charged 600 to 1,000 times. I was told at the booth that Schwinn is testing a newer-generation Toshiba battery that will be officially rated for 4,000 charges, but is actually capable of providing around 6,000 charges.

The various components associated with adding electric power to the bike weigh approximately 12 pounds, so the bike itself isn’t prohibitively heavy when human powered.

Sales of electric bikes are just starting to catch on. According to the Electric Bikes Worldwide Report, 2008 Update, U.S. eBike sales will reach 222,000 units in 2009, an increase of 83 percent over 2007. European sales will hit 750,000 units, up a whopping 300 percent over 2007.

Look for the Tailwind to be available in independent bicycle shops throughout the U.S. and Canada later this month. It will have a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $3,199.

Sharing the Connection

by David English on January 23rd, 2009

If you have a cellular data plan for your notebook or netbook computer, you may feel as though you’re paying a lot for very little flexibility. The plans tend to run about $60 a month, and the signal is tied to a specific data modem, whether it’s an internal or a USB-attached modem. Consequently, you can use only one device at a time, unless you take on significant security risks.

Too bad there’s no easy way to share your notebook’s cellular signal with your phone, media player, PDA, camera, or portable gaming system.

Help may be on the way. Novatel Wireless’ MiFi promises to create a “personal cloud of high-speed Internet connectivity.” Essentially, it replaces your internal or USB-attached cellular modem with a small external cellular modem that doubles as a wireless router. It can distribute the data connection to your notebook, your colleague’s notebook, and any other Wi-Fi-compatible device.

The MiFi is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It operates for fours hours on a charge, has a standby time of 40 hours, and recharges in 2 1/2 hours. Look for it to be available sometime in the first half of the year.

Here’s the rub. You can theoretically connect as many as five devices at a time, but that number can be configured down to just one device by the carrier. Novatel Wireless doesn’t have any choice here, as the MiFi has to be approved by each carrier. If Verizon or Sprint decides your MiFi will connect with only one device, that’s how it will have to be.

There’s a lot of potential here. Unfortunately, the carriers may be so afraid that potential customers will use it for a free ride, they’ll miss out on the possibility that data sharing could attract even larger numbers of new customers. The airports are full of road warriors who travel with multiple Wi-Fi devices. A fully configured MiFi could encourage more of them to sign up for cellular data plans.

Be a Slacker

by David English on January 21st, 2009

You may have tried some Internet radio services and decided they aren’t worth the trouble. That’s what I thought until I encountered Slacker.

At CES, I spoke with a Slacker representative at the RIM (Research in Motion) booth. I learned the streaming service now supports the BlackBerry, iPhone, and iPod Touch, as well as the company’s own Slacker G2 handheld device. You can also stream the radio stations directly from slacker.com.

These aren’t traditional broadcast radio stations. You can choose from more than 100 pre-programmed genre stations or create your own stations by building playlists based on your favorite artists. Slacker has the legal rights to millions of songs, and the audio quality is very good.

You can use Slacker for free, though you’ll be limited in how many times you can skip past a song you don’t like, and you won’t be able to customize a station down to one artist. You’ll also have to listen to the occasional commercial (every five songs when I tried it). Alternatively, you can pay $3.99 a month and have unlimited skips, unlimited song requests, and no ads.

Slacker’s BlackBerry application has a significant advantage over the iPhone/iPod application. The company worked with RIM to allow the BlackBerry to cache stations to the SD memory card. You can store songs on the card and listen to them later when you don’t have a cellular signal. That could be handy when you’re flying on a commercial airline.

Versatile Wireless

by David English on January 18th, 2009

The i2i Stream was one of the more interesting products I saw this year at CES. Many competing products use Bluetooth’s A2DP profile for their wireless audio, including the Kyocera Wireless Music Gateway, RIM BlackBerry Bluetooth Music Gateway, and Nokia A2DP Bluetooth Gateway. Most of them work quite well.

Aerielle takes a different approach with its i2i Stream product. When you open the two-module pack, you may wonder which is the transmitter and which is the receiver. It doesn’t matter. They’re identical, and you can add additional modules to receive the same signal.

You can also configure the modules for multiple streams, and that’s where this product becomes more versatile than the current products that use A2DP. Any i2i Stream transmitting module can stream to any i2i Stream receiving module. Simply press the lit channel-button in the center until the color matches between the transmitting and receiving units. It’s that simple.

The i2i Stream does have an annoying feature that I hope is fixed in the future. The linked modules continue to display the linked color, even after you’ve paired them. That isn’t so bad. The problem is the transmitting unit flashes continuously. If you’re in a darkened room, you’ll probably want to cover it with something.

The modules also automatically turn off after a few minutes of silence, which means if you mute the sound during a commercial break, you’ll have to turn on the units again when the program resumes (best to avoid using the mute).

Otherwise, the modules worked fine. You can expect about 5 to 7 hours from a USB-power charge. I had no problem transmitting well over 30 feet. The audio quality was very good with no static or dropouts, even though the i2i Stream communicates on the sometimes congested 2.4 GHz band.

Clear Sound

by David English on January 11th, 2009

When Sennheiser launches a new flagship set of headphones, they’re well worth a listen. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the company had a sound booth where you could compare their former top headphones, the HD 650, with their new top headphones, the HD 800.

The HD 650 is well known as having a clear, uncolored sound that comes very close to accurately representing the original sound. Sennheiser provided a selection of CDs that you could test with the headphones. I settled on a Diana Krall album.

The HD 650 sounded fine, but then I tried the HD 800. Holy cow, what a difference. The music was much clearer. The stereo separation was the best I’ve heard from a set of headphones. And the overall sense of presence was amazing. It was obvious when returning to the HD 650 that they sounded dull in comparison.

How does the HD 800 achieve such an incredible sound? It features two 56mm sound transducers, which are currently the largest available in a set of dynamic headphones. Also unusual, the vibrating part of the diaphragm is a ring rather than a circular surface area.

There are many of innovations, but the end result is a total harmonic distortion of less than 0.02 percent and a frequency response from 6 to 51,000 Hz. And as the Sennheiser representatives pointed out to me several times (they seemed particularly proud of this), the HD 800 is handmade.

You know the HD 800 headphones won’t come cheap, though the $1,399.95 list price was actually less than I expected. They won’t be available until February, so there’s still time to figure out how in the world you could possibly justify such an expenditure.

Palm Is Back

by David English on January 9th, 2009

If you attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), you’ll inevitably be asked at least once during the day, “See anything good?” Or sometimes the question will be, “what’s the best thing you’ve seen so far?”

It’s usually not that easy to answer either question. This year, at least at the end of the first day of the show, the answer would have to Palm’s new phone, the Palm Pre. Most of us had counted out Palm as having been left far behind — with little chance of catching up. To recover, Palm needed to hit a home run, and that’s just what the company has done.

While the hardware is impressive, it’s Palm’s new “webOS” that makes the new phone innovative. Imagine the easy-of-use touch interface of an iPhone married to the integrated productivity of a BlackBerry.

Highlights include a hidden QWERTY keyboard (it slides out from the bottom), support for multi-touch gestures (zoom in and zoom out of a Web page), a dedicated gesture area separate from the main content area (your finger won’t cover up what you need to see), and intelligent searches that begin locally but seamlessly branch outward to sites such as Google and Wikipedia.

How will the Pre complete with the 10,000 iPhone applications available through iTunes? According to Palm, if you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can create Pre apps. That’s how the built-in programs were created, and they’re both fast and relatively powerful.

The Pre will be available through Sprint in the first half of this year. If that turns out to be June, the Pre will have to complete with a substantial number of applications for the BlackBerry and Android phones. It has only 8GB of on-board memory, and there’s no card slot for additional storage. Also, the 320×480-pixel screen may be a tad small at 3.1 inches.

In its favor, Palm has been down this road before. There’s still a remarkable amount of good will for the company, especially among developers – many who started out writing simple productivity and communications programs for the Palm Pilot.

For any other company, it might be too late to successfully enter this crowded field during a downturn in the economy. Given that it’s Palm and based on the CES demo, I would have to say they have a very good change of succeeding. Sprint should be especially pleased as the Pre will likely attract a significant number of new subscribers.

Quantum Leap

by David English on January 7th, 2009

Get ready for massively larger SD cards.

Today, the SD Association announced a new SD card specification: the SDXC. The XC stands for eXtended Capacity. SDXC cards promise capacities as large as 2 terabytes, as well as a faster bus speed.

According to the SD Association, SDXC cards are expected to reach “read/write speeds to 104 megabytes per second this year, with a road map to 300 megabytes per second.” They will have the same physical dimensions as the current generation of SD and SDHC cards.

Tapping into SDXC’s higher capacities and faster speeds, digital cameras would be able to save full-resolution images continuously onto the card (no longer be limited by the size of the memory buffer). Flash-based camcorders could save continuous ultra-high-speed video, similar to the video generated by the Casio EX-FH20, directly to the card. And handheld audio recorders could potentially store 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound to a card in real time.

Look for SDXC cards to possibly trickle in by the end of the year, with a full launch set for 2010.

As you might expect, your devices would need to be compatible with this new format. That means you’ll have to buy a whole new round of gadgets to take advantage of these new capabilities. SDXC is backwardly compatible, so your current SD and SDHC cards should work in your new SDXC-compatible devices.

Triple Threat

by David English on January 1st, 2009

Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch devices are rapidly becoming the premiere portable platform for casual games. The hardware is capable of supporting relatively fast 3-D graphics, and the iTunes store lets you easily browse, purchase, and download more than 10,000 applications. Many are free or offered in no-cost trial versions.

One of the best games from 2008 is Trism. As in Tetris and Bejeweled, you position compatible items next to each other in order to remove those items from the grid. This is the kind of game you learn in a few minutes, but spend hours trying to perfect.

Trism moves beyond its predecessors by incorporating the iPhone/iPod’s touch and accelerometer functions. You move the rows by touching and sliding them, and you control the direction the rows will slide by rotating the iPhone or iPod.

That may sound as though there’s too much to keep up with. Fortunately, the gameplay feels intuitive. By tilting the device, you more easily see potential color combinations. You earn extra points and rewards when you match four or more adjacent triangles, rather than the minimal three.

The game saves your place if you need to exit for a break or answer a phone call, making it ideal for when you have only a minute or two to spare.

If you have the iTunes software on your computer, this link should automagically take you to the Trism page in the iTunes Store.