Joy of Gadgets

Talk about a no-frills mobile phone. This is truly it–the HOP1800 from Hop-On. The phone has no screen and 14 buttons: the typical number pad, a send key, and an end key. That’s it. Not even SMS. That’s because there is no screen!

The phone is available in both European (GSM 900/1800) and Americas (GSM 850/1900) dual-band configurations. As the graphic says, the price is $10. To whom, though? And is this price even realistic? I don’t think so.

There are a few games I spent far too many quarters in as a kid. One of them was Punch Out, a boxing game that pitted you against such boxers as Glass Joe, Piston Hurricane, Bald Bull, and of course the dude at the end: Mr. Sandman. They also made versions for the NES, though it nothing comes close to the original.

It’s nice to know that the folks at Nintendo haven’t forgotten there’s a bunch of us 12 year olds in the mid 1980s that grew up to become 30-somethings wanting to relive a taste of our misspent youth. They are revamping and bringing the classic game to the Wii.

Of course, based on the trailer, it’s probably going to be different than the original arcade game, or even the weak NES version. Hopefully it’s easier to manipulate than the boxing that comes on Wii Sports, which is difficult to get the moves right.

Via TechEBlog

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The Gorillapod Focus is a tripod designed for professional-grade cameras. Unlike most tripods that have rigid legs, the Gorillapod has flexible, yet sturdy legs, allowing you to, for instance, wrap the tripod around a post, or fold it up into an interesting shape. The camera attaches to the tripod with either a 1/4″ or 3/8″ screws (adapter included).

I don’t think I have a camera that weighs even close to 11 pounds–which is how much this little tripod will hold. If I did, this might be one of the tripods I would carry. It’d be cool if the tripod were longer, but even at 11 inches, you should be able to wrap this thing around something taller, if you need to!

At $149, it’s a bit pricey, but you have to remember where this is aimed at: people with several thousand dollar cameras. If your needs are a bit more modest and you have a smaller, lighter (up to 7 ounce) point-and-shoot camera, you can try the original Gorillapod for $24.95, including free ground shipping!

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No, not a snowflake snowflake, the Snowflake from Blue Microphones!

This little USB microphone is about the size of a deck of card, when folded up. When you separate the white plastic from the aluminum base with the microphone–they pull apart easily–you can either put the microphone on top of your monitor–it hooks on an LCD monitor, or you can set it on your desk. An included USB cable is hooked to the back of the microphone.

The sound quality? Pretty good! I used the Skype test call plus a call with a friend of mine to verify the audio quality. It will be a worthy addition to my laptop bag for travel.

I’ve heard Andy Abramson use this microphone with Ken Rutkowski on KenRadio and have heard the recordings over Skype, it sounds great. That is, when Andy has a good Internet connection

You can get the Blue Snowflake for $69 (or less) from a local Blue Microphones dealer or through the Internet, of course. Well worth it if you want your voice to sound good on the go!

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Image via Wikipedia

A while ago, I got a pair of headphones from Radius Products to review. They are these in-ear headsets that go deeper into the ear, sealing out noise, sound great! The problem I have is when I put the headphones in my pocket. After a while the earphone fittings simply fall off, either in my pocket or someplace else. Sometimes, they even come out in my ear. Sometimes, they simply get lost.

I have to assume this is a universal problem of sorts, i.e. it’s not specific to the unit I reviewed. However, I can’t easily find a way to replace the earphone fittings. You’d think someone would sell replacement earphone fittings. I found a couple of places, but they are somewhat expensive in comparison to their actual cost, which can’t be more than a few pennies! The fact there aren’t replacements in stores seems silly.

So what happens when you lose the earphone fitings for your deep in-ear headphones? Do you just buy new ones? Is there some reasonably inexpensive of a similar style that are more sturdy in this area?

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The other phone I got last week was the Nokia N96, though this came from the folks at Nokia’s Blogger Relations program instead of T-Mobile.

My first impression is that it is a cross between the Nokia N95 and the Nokia N81. Unlike the Nokia N95, and like the N81, the headset jack is up top. This is an infinitely more useful place for it to be when I, say, want to set it on the treadmill like is shown here.

Unlike the N81, and like the N95, it has a nice 5 megapixel camera. Whereas the Nokia N81 has a similar quality camera to the Nokia 6301 I used to take this picture, the N96 has a good camera. I’ve posted a few pictures on my Share on Ovi account.

In the “cross between the N95 and N81″ category, it has both a 16gb internal storage memory and a MicroSD slot for additional memory storage. I was able to load all my 4 and 5-star rated song from iTunes on my phone and I still have a ton of space left over!

Speaking of which, it took an order of magnitude less time to sync 7.6 gigs of data to the N96. Instead of the 700k a second I have typically gotten with most other Nokia devices I’ve played with, I was getting around 5000k a second (give or take). The device actually enumerates as USB 2.0 unlike previous Nokia’s that I’ve played with, and it synced much faster!

The phone has a newer version of S60 on it, S60 3rd Edition FP2. It has several enhancements that I discuss on phoneboy.com that I won’t get into here. They are nice usability enhancements over previous handsets.

Some other random things I’ve seen that are improvements:

• A kickstand to allow the handset to stand up on its side.
• The volume increments in 5% increments with a headset plugged in. Nice idea, but it doesn’t actually seem to work.
• A power-save mode the handset goes into when the battery life drops down to 1 bar. I’m not sure exactly what it does.
• Geo-tagging photos. It’s not something I want to do, but it’s nice to know it’s there.
• Slide-to-lock on the top of the phone like the N81. I know people have different feelings on it, but I like it.
• Dual-LED flash. Not Xenon, but it’s still better than the N95.

However, based on the experience with the software build on the phone, I am not entirely happy. It reminds me very much of the early public releases of the N95-1 in that it was buggy, locked up, and otherwise did weird things. I can get this to happen with just the built-in apps and Mail for Exchange 2.7 using the v11.018 firmware. If I were the product manager for this program and saw these problems, I would have at the very least questioned if this product was ready for release.

Some of the weird things I’ve run into include:

• Music Player playing weird, sped-up, garbled audio in the middle of a song or podcast. Pausing and restarting the audio clears it up.
• After several hours of being on, applications will randomly lock up, crash, and hang. Power cycle restores functionality.
• Applications do not always reorient from landscape mode properly. For example, try taking a photo/video and emailing the video to a friend. Screen should orient out of landscape mode, but it does not.
• The phone does not respond to the media keys at all or takes more than a few seconds to do so.

Of course, I have no doubt that my Nokia colleagues will fix these issues in due course. If anyone inside the mothership wants more details on the problems I’m running into, look me up in the Nokia Phonebook.

I recently signed up for the T-Mobile @Home service through the folks that support voice services at Nokia, where I work. I was sent a Nokia 6301 along with the Hotspot @Home router. The draw? Free calls on the home WiFi, or in earshot of any T-Mobile Hotspot. Why not?

Normally, I would not be buying–or necessarily wanting–a phone like the Nokia 6301. I am quite firmly a smartphone user. The Nokia 6301 is most certainly not a smartphone, but if you want the free calls over WiFi, this is one of the handful of phones T-Mobile sells that permits you to use the Hotspot @Home service.

The technology behind T-Mobile @Home is called UMA. I won’t get into it in detail here, but in short, it allows seamless transitions between your home WiFi and the mobile phone network. I cover UMA in a little more detail on phoneboy.com.

Now, onto the phone hardware. It’s a pretty run of the mill S40 5th Edition FP1 device. Has the usual assortment of keys on the front, power button on the top, volume control on the right side, a 2.5mm headset jack, power, and a not-very accessible USB port. On mine, I basically have to take the back cover off in order to be able to get the port cover off.

Once you take the battery cover off, you can also access the MicroSD slot. The device comes with a 512mb MicroSD card that you can load with music or use to store pictures taken with the 2 megapixel camera.

Unfortunately, I have been spoiled by the two variants of the N95 that I currently have as well as the older N73 and the newly arrived N96, which I will cover later. The 2 megapixel camera on the Nokia 6301 certainly won’t win any awards, but it takes servicable pictures, as shown on my Share on Ovi account. The one feature the Nokia 6301 camera DOES have is the ability to take pictures in landscape mode, giving you a 960×1280 picture. You have to manually put it in that mode, but it’s a nice touch that it has that feature.

The phone has an Active Standby screen like my Nokia smartphones have, but it is disabled by default. Once it is enabled, you can have a number of icons display along the top–you can choose as many as you want among the pre-selected choices. There’s also sections for Music/Radio, Calendar/Notes and more. You can even customize in which of these sections–if any–these will show.

The features are nice, but the real test for this phone is the sound quality–particularly over WiFi. I called someone today and talked with them for an hour on my Nokia 6301 using my home WiFi. They had no idea I was on a mobile phone, much less over WiFi. The audio quality–for both of us–was that good.

I also tested the phone handoff between WiFi and GSM. I started a call with 800-555-TELL (a.k.a TellMe) and played the blackjack with the lovely Sean Connery impersonated voice. The call didn’t miss a beat, though there was an audible “thunk” when the call handed off.

I tried the web browser, which is a fairly basic XHTML/WAP browser. It’s functional, but it’s not the Webkit-based browser that’s on my Nseries devices. Of course, when you’re not in WiFi range, you really don’t want to be web browsing much since the phone only supports GPRS on T-Mobile’s US network–not even EDGE.

One note about the WiFi on this phone: it is only provided for use with the T-Mobile @Home service, or whatever UMA service provider you buy the phone from. It will not work independently of UMA. The good news is that while you’re in range of a configured WiFi access point, the data transfer is much faster.

One downside to S40 devices is that contact and calendar sync are a little more of a challenge. T-Mobile has a (presumably subscription) service where you can sync your stuff to the cloud. Since I have no interest in that, I set up PC Suite on my work computer and am syncing my calendar and contacts over Bluetooth. The phone also, surprisingly, has Nokia’s “Phone switch” application, which makes it possible to sync information between phones.

All in all, the phone is not a bad little device. It’s probably something I’ll carry alongside something more functional and with an AT&T SIM, but for a voice-centric device, it does the job.

The one piggy bank I actually remember having as a kid was a safe. It was a little yellow thing with a slot on the top to put coins or folded up bills. I was bad about saving money in that thing.

Meanwhile, piggy banks have gotten more fancy. Take this ATM Piggy Bank for instance. It takes coins, bills, and is protected by a personal PIN code. Oh yeah, and it even sounds like an ATM, too.

Counting the money in your piggy bank is kind of fun,. This gadget takes the fun out of it by showing you exactly how much is in there. Come to think of it, an automatic counter might be a good thing.

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From our “What the…” department comes this new usb storage drive enclosed in a teddy bear.

To use the drive, you have to remove the bear’s head, apparently the designers were watching too much sleepy hollow.

The usb drive is available now from USB Geek
Lifelong therapy for your kids not included.

Via Geek Alerts

I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t like getting poked with needles. I have to turn away while they stuck me. It just feels weird. Donating blood was even weirder.

While I don’t think this particular method could be used for a blood draw, a Japanese inventor has found a way to inject medicine into your veins without a needle. The method involves using gasses and/or air pressure to deliver the drugs.

While these methods have been around for a while, they have been expensive and cumbersome to use. This Japanese inventor has also figured out a way to substantially reduce the cost and make them easier to use.

Sounds almost like Star Trek, don’t you think?

National Geographic via Ubergizmo, Gizmodo