New devices to consumer digital media
This is the concluding part of the review of the Sonos BU130 Review
Formats supported
The Sonos players support MP3, WMA (including purchased Windows Media downloads), AAC (MPEG4), Ogg Vorbis, Audible (format 4), Apple Lossless, Flac (lossless) as well as uncompressed WAV and AIFF files. Apple DRM and WMA lossless are not supported.
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Sonos like several other companies make music streaming systems. The BU130 consists of a controller and two ZP80 players all packaged into a single large’ish cardboard box. For the review, Sonos also supplied a docking cradle for the controller, which is an optional accessory, but it makes the whole system a lot neater in appearance.
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iSupply did one of their usual Teardown’s on the Apple iPhone, estimating that they are on a 55% margin for each 8Gb phone that they sell.
The Teardown involves taking new consumer devices apart, as soon as they’re released, and working out how much they cost manufacturers to build and therefore how much profit – or loss – the sale of each device brings.
Such is the influence of iSupply these days, the news of the very healthy margin appeared to cause a rise in the value of Apple’s shares, up 4.9%.
The bill of materials and manufacturing costs totalled $265.83, with the iPhone selling for $599.
Given the close-to-lunatic media coverage (you’ll have noticed that we’ve been rather restrained, if not a little dismissive of the madness), we suspect that there’ll be triples all around at Apple’s 1 Infinite Loop office and some big celebrations over the 4 July holiday in the US today.
Hoping to lure the wallets of well heeled students and small businesses, Toshiba have announced the addition of the Satellite U305 range to their lappie line up.
The Vista Home Premium-powered machines come in three flavours, starting out at $899 for the Satellite U305-S5097 and going up to $1,399 for the Satellite U305-S5127.
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Motorola have a new campaign to push a set of their stereo BlueTooth music headphones, the Motorola S9 or MotoRokr S9 as they’re sometimes called.
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Listen to the Interview – [audio:https://digital-lifestyles.info/media/audio/baran-tigrel-pro-self-RCA-2007.mp3]
A headphone-style set that allows you to compare your sporting progress with a virtual competitor.
Many sports are possible, but let’s use running as an example. You and a friend decide on a running route, each time you run it, the relative position of your friends previous time is relayed into your ears, “He’s way ahead of you,” or “You’re neck and neck,” etc.
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Leaving the safety and relative sanity of our London office for a six day soiree at Glastonbury, we thought carefully about what gadgets to pack. Being veterans of Glasto – and all too familiar with the minging mudbath of 2005 – we made sure to pack ample waterproof clothing and bring along plenty of plastic bags for wrapping up our gadgets against the inevitable rain.
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Seemingly metamorphosing at a rate of knots as the iPhone rumbles over the horizon, iRiver’s W10 media player has re-emerged again as a sleek all-in-one media player.
First seen in March 2006, the W10 appeared as a UMPC-like clamshell gadget running Windows XP with a 5in display and a 60GB hard drive for storage.
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We can’t say this its old school plasticky looks are exactly grabbing our gonads of pleasure, but the new Pepper Pad 3 certainly manages to pack in a fair bit of functionality.
Billed as being neither a laptop or a PDA, the Linux-powered “handheld media computer” invites comparisons with the Nokia 770 tablet, although there’s far more going on underneath its (sizeable) hood.
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In