Reviewing digital media devices and services
First mentioned on Digital Lifestyles back in October 2008, the music playing Spotify app has impressed us so much that it’s become a regular feature in the office.
In case you’ve forgotten already, let us refresh you about what the program does: Spotify serves up instant, legal access to millions of tracks completely free of charge via an interface every bit as slick as iTunes.
For computer nerds and technology freaks in New York, the place to be around Christmas was the excellent Wired Store in midtown Manhattan, which veritably bristled with the latest gadgets, gizmos and must-have widgets.
Seeing as many MP3 players come with cheap headphones so frightful that they make LCD Soundsystem sound like a drunk busker, spending a few bob on a decent pair can make a real difference to your sonic pleasure.
Looking rather natty in an all black, rubberised case, the Eton FR140 radio aims to be the perfect companion for deep forays into the countryside or as a handy take-everywhere travel gadget for the self sufficient.
Part one of our Sony Vaio P Review was wowed at shiny colours; initial impressions on opening it and amazing screen resolution. Here’s the concluding section.
Keyboard impresses
If the display didn’t exactly knock us out, the keyboard was an unexpected treat. Although it’s clearly substantially smaller than a full laptop keyboard (Sony say that it’s 88 percent the size of their Sony Vaio TT keyboard, which is already smaller than a regular keyboard), it’s extremely well designed. We managed to get up a fair rate of knots on the thing with few errors and would feel comfortable typing out quite a few emails on it.
We think this is the first serious review of the Sony Vaio P, it’s not a just a couple of quick paragraphs, but a more in depth examination for what it’s like to use. We hope you enjoy it.
We’d already dribbled and drooled all over the first press photos of Sony’s gorgeous new Vaio P Series netbook, so couldn’t miss the opportunity to check it out at the UK launch event at the famous champagne bar at St Pancras station.
Our first impressions – once we got over the disappointment of the promised free champagne being replaced by a warm cup of coffee (! :) ) – was overwhelmingly positive.
In part one of our Asus Eee 901 review we gave you some background on the little beauty and what you get inside. Read on for more details and the conclusions and scores.
In all of the excitement of the holiday season, it looks like we forgot to bring you this part two. If you’ve been sitting on the edge of your seats in anticipation, you’ve probably got a pretty numb bottom!
Connectivity
The Eee should have enough ports and connectivity options to suit most needs, sporting 3xUSB 2.0 ports, Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11b/g and 802.11n Wi-Fi, Ethernet port, SD card slot and D-Sub video output.
After a near-Olympian bout of advanced pondering and spec-sniffing – as witnessed in our recent Looking For The Ultimate Netbook feature, we finally plumped for the Asus Eee 901.
The netbook is available in both Windows XP and Linux versions, and we plumped for the XP version on account of our familiarity with the OS and the fact that it promised a slightly longer battery life (albeit at the price of reduced flash memory).
We managed to get a brief hands on with the Peek email gadget at the WiredStore in New York and thought we’d share a few impressions.
This little fella is designed for one thing only – accessing mobile email over the GPRS data network – and comes with a full keypad and a 240 x 320 pixels colour screen (with a rather small font size).
We’ve got hold of the new top of the line handset from snom – the snom 820 – and are the first to review it.
It’s the flagship – and currently only member of – the new snom 8 Series range and radically redesigned from their 3xx series.
The look is striking, making it stand out as a executive tool, ready for some serious ‘power dialling’.