Those crazy hep cats at Sennheiser have launched a range of seven new economy-priced headphones aimed at da yoot.
Served up in a range of bright colours and stylish designs, the ‘phones are built to a tough (“almost unbreakable”) standard, with prices ranging from £10 to £25. All incorporate a neodymium-iron driver for top notch sound.
The bottom of the range MX50 Street in-ear phones knock out for just £10, while the next model up, the MX 51 Street adds a case for a fiver more.
The next model up, the MXL 51 Street, is bundled with a lanyard and case for another fiver.
The curious looking MX55 in-ear headphones – also £20 – feature a “twist to fit” construction and come with the Sennheiser Basswind System Plus for extra oomph in da hood, with the MX55 VC adding a volume control for an extra fiver.
Moving up the range, the £20 OMX 50 VC features clip-on earphones, while the “supra-aural” (whassat?) clip-on OMX 52 Street includes the Sennheiser Basswind technology and exchangeable design parts for £25.
An old school neckband pair of cans, the PMX 50 Street ‘phones wrap up the new range and come with exchangeable design parts and retail for £25.
All are likely to sound better than the headphones that came bundled with your MP3 player, but if you want to get the best out of your music player (and don’t mind looking like an extra from the Battle Of Britain), we recommend saving up for the fabulous Grado SR60s.
Find out more about Sennhesiser’s new range of Street headphones at their ghastly pop-up, Flash-tastic website, where just about anything that can move, shuffle and wobble, does.
Now available for early Christmas shoppers is the rather curious iLuv i1055, a portable tablet-style DVD player with a built in 7-inch TFT LCD and twin 2 x 0.5W speakers. 
The media player comes in two colours (black and white, so you can match it to your iPod), while those with older 1st or 2nd-generation iPods can use a line-in jack on the back of the unit. 
The iLuv i1055 can be powered by a 10V AC Power Adapter, 12V Cigarette Lighter Adapter or its built Ni-MH Rechargeable Battery, serving up a claimed 2.5 hours playing time (which means you may come unstuck if you’re trying to watch one of those ultra long arthouse movies). 
UK PC vendors Evesham have rolled out what they’re claiming is the smallest and lightest notebook on the market to feature an optical drive. 
What makes this wee laptop unusual is the fact that Evesham’s engineers have managed to wedge in a DVD/CDRW/Dual Layer DVD-RW drive, instead of offering the usual external optical drive bundled with most small laptops. 
There’s also onboard audio and speakers and a battery life claimed at a healthy five hours, with an optional extended battery ramping uptime to a day-spanning ten hours. 
Smaller than a pixie’s pocket plaything, the ridiculously tiny Ultra Portable Personal Media Player and Recorder is quite the teensiest thing we’ve seen for a while. 
Lord knows how they’ve managed to fit it in, but there’s also a speaker onboard too, although we imagine the output must be quieter than a gnat having a snooze. 
It’s as cheap as chips too, with Gadget Universe offering it for just $80 (£42, €62). 
The US is responsible for a fifth of the world’s spam, according to security firm Sophos. 
Most unsolicited emails are churned out by zombie PCs. These don’t walk towards you, arms outstretched and making funny groaning noises, but are computers that have been silently infected with Trojans, worms and viruses that turn your lovely PC into a spam-spewing beast. 
Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has chatted to Reuters about his thoughts on mobile phones, and how their ownership and usage should be free, supported of course by advertising. In his words “It just makes sense that subsidies should increase” as advertising rises on mobile phones. 
Google Maps for Mobile now officially supports GPS location information when used with mobile phones … well at least one of them at the moment, the Helio Drift. 
A UK company specialising in waterproof bags, OverBoard, have widened their selection of waterproof cases to include electronic gear. 
Not content with just providing their leisure range, they’ve decided to tackle the design problem of a waterproof iPod case for extreme water sports, a range they call pro-Sports. Not only are they more rugged, but float, so your rather expensive music player doesn’t start playing its tunes to the fishes. 
The time I had with it gave me the impression that the case is very tough. There’s two leads supplied, a neoprene velcro sports arm strap (for attaching to your arm – in the photo) and a safety break neck lanyard. 
Microsoft is giving the Universal Music Group (UMG) a per-unit fee for each Zune that they sell, in addition to the money that they’ll make out sell music tracks on it too. 
If you’re finding that the built-in flash on your compact camera has the illuminating power of a Woodbine in a gale force breeze, it might be worth investing in the Metz 28 CS-2 Digital slave flash. 
To ensure that the Metz fires at the same time as the camera’s onboard flash, the unit can be put in a learning mode which calculates and stores the correct flash trigger. 
It took a matter of seconds to ‘train’ the Metz to fire at the same time as the Ricoh’s onboard flash and we had no problems getting it to respond to each and every subsequent shot. 
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