If you’re fed up with having to use the rubbish headphones that came with your Treo, you may want to consider investing in BoxWave’s Dual Handsfree Stereo Adapter.
Like many other mobile manufacturers, Palm elected to use the non-standard 2.5mm headphone socket, meaning that you can’t use your favourite headphones with the device.
Although many electronics stores like Maplins carry simple 2.5mm (male) to 3.5mm (female) stereo adapters, your listening pleasure is going to be interrupted every time you take a call as you’ll have to unplug your headphones every time. Not cool.
So here’s where the BoxWave’s Dual Handsfree Stereo Adapter comes in.
The unit features a simple (gold plated) 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter which connects up to a small control unit which includes an integrated microphone, single-touch answer call button, volume control, and a switch for toggling between music and handsfree phone mode.
The adapter also comes with a removable lapel clip so that you can clip the microphone to your jacket, and to avoid the usual spaghetti tangle of wires, there’s a clever cable retract/recoil design that winds in any excess cabling.
Giving it some welly
We tested the adapter with a Palm Treo 650 and a pair of Grado SR60 cans.
Giving it a bit of welly with some MP3s played back on Pocket Tunes, everything worked as advertised, with the music mode automatically pausing the tunes whenever a call came in on the Treo.
As soon as the call was finished, the music would kick back in again, so there was no need to go rummaging about in bags or pockets. Sweet.
We also liked the retractable cable, although there’s no denying that the combination of adapter, cable coiler and control unit added a bit of bulk.
Although we initially had a problem with a noisy potentiometer (that’s a volume control to most people, but we’re trying hard to impress you here), Boxwave were quick to send out a replacement, so it looks like their customer service is on the case.
Overall, we found the BoxWave to be well worth the outlay (currently on offer from their site at $20.95) and a great investment if you want to be able to get the best music performance out of your Palm Treo 650/700p/700w.
If you haven’t got a Palm, you might be interested to note that Boxwave also do a Dual Handsfree Stereo Headset which replicates most of the functionality of the Palm version, but has non-removable headphones – check out their page for compatible models.
Features: 80%
Build: 80%
Value For Money: 85%
Overall: 80%
Yet more proof that Koreans are spoilt rotten when it comes to having the very latest must-have mobile gadgets comes in the form of Samsung’s brand new phone – displayed, as ever, by scantily clad models.
The chunky black clamshell phone also lets users switch between having a small Picture in Picture (PiP) display showing the secondary channel or splitting the display in half, with the two selected channels sharing the total viewing area.
Naturally, users can also elect to fill the screen with just the one channel for fuddy-duddy, old-school types who are satisfied with just one channel playing simultaneously.
Hollywood hot shot Gary Oldman is today releasing his new short film, shot on the Nokia N93 we’re told.
Happy Slapping
We’ve been keeping our eyes on 
O2 have announced the usage charges of Visual Radio. At O2’s standard data rates of £3.00 per Mb dependent on tariff or O2 Browse and Download bolt-ons from £3 for 2mb and £5 for 4mb.
Will you be one of the near-half billion (446m to be exact) people that IMS Research estimate will be watching TV on their cellular handsets around the globe by 2011?
IMS Research
Sony Ericsson has announced the latest addition to its popular ‘K’ series, with the ‘candybar’ shaped Sony K618 promising super fast video, music streaming and Web browsing.
The memory card can be upgraded up to a maximum of 1GB of storage.
For keen bloggers who like to update their personal diaries when you’re on the move, the K618 can send images direct to their own blog via Mobile Blogger.
Like the Black Knights in Monty Python’s ‘Holy Grail,’ PDAs are refusing to be beaten, despite almost monthly declarations of their impending obsolescence.
This explains how worldwide PDA end-user revenue fell by 4.1 percent last year to $1.38 billion in the second quarter of 2006.
For a self confessed, gimme-gimme-shiny-new gadgets nutcase like me to be using a phone several years old speaks volumes of the strengths of the Treo 650.
If I’d have taken my Windows Mobile phone I dare say I would have been very well acquainted with stylus (and the reset button) by this time, but the Treo’s fabulous one-handed operation and rock solid performance made it a practical laptop replacement.
Palm has remained tight-lipped about their European product roadmap, with the web rife with rumours of both Windows and Palm new models going under ggroovy codenames like Hollywood, Lowrider, Nitro and Lennon.
The mobile division of TV production company Twofour and Player One Sports are working together to create a weekly short form TV show covering the Australian portion of the Ashes tour for portable devices.
Well they got there finally, Vodafone UK have announced that they’re releasing the less than catchy named Vodafone Mobile Connect USB Modem in the Autumn. It will support their 3G data service and, surprise, surprise, connect to computers using a USB lead. Rather neatly the software disks aren’t needed, as they’re installed directly from the modem.